French Jews wrestling with the Israel factor

National Catholic Reporter, July 29, 1994 by Joseph Cunneen

The 100th anniversary of the first Dreyfus trial is an appropriate occasion to examine the present situation of Jews in France, as well as Jewish-Catholic relations.

The deep strains of nationalism and anti-Semitism that existed here for centuries help explain the conviction of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus in 1894 on trumped-up charges of espionage. The subsequent cover-up by the military high command and Emile Zola's challenging book, J'accuse, unleashed a flood of bitter debate that divided the whole country.

One quick way to measure the change in French Catholicism's attitude to Jews is to see the difference between what La Croix, the Catholic daily owned by the Assumptionist Fathers, said during the Dreyfus affair and its position today.

One hundred years ago, La Croix referred to "the Jewish enemy betraying France" and bragged of being "the most anti-Jewish Catholic paper in France." Its present director, Noel Copin, a layman and widely respected professional journalist, editorializes that such a position was produced "by an anti-Semitism that was, above all, religious," and praises the Assumptionists - who still own the paper - for opening their archives and those of the paper to serious researchers.

An American woman religious teaching theology in Lyon, however, cautions against jumping to the conclusion that French Catholic anti-Semitism is dead. She recalls that it had been an ongoing discordant note, present even in such writers as Bernanos and Claudel and says she finds traces of it even now in otherwise sophisticated acquaintances.

Her judgment is echoed by Joseph Amas, vice president of the Jewish community of Carpentras, which is also the home of France's oldest synagogue. When the town's Jewish cemetery was desecrated a few years ago, an instantaneous show of unity brought together government leaders and church dignitaries.

However, the right-wing National Front continues to threaten with simplistic slogans such as "France for the French." Although most of its explicit rhetoric refers to Arab workers, French Jews also somehow remain foreigners in the eyes of the far right

Amas doesn't want to exaggerate the danger and analyzes it in political rather than religious terms. He emphasizes that Judaism is not primarily a matter of doctrine; family practices and familiarity with Jewish history are more important.

Amas tells how impressed he was during a recent visit to Israel to observe Muslims stopping in the street to pray at designated times. An advocate of practical interreligious cooperation, he encourages me to attend a forthcoming meeting of Coup de Soleil, a group bringing together Muslims, Christians and Jews from North Africa in friendship and cooperation.

His recommendation reminds me of the analysis of Martine Cohen, one of the leading sociologists of religion in France, who stresses the importance of the recent immigration of Sephardic Jews from North Africa. She estimates that more than 220,000 have come since 1950, helping replace the Ashkenazi in terms of majority influence within the Jewish community.

The Sephardic Jews have tended to re-create their network of small group associations in France, and their vitality has created an atmosphere in which there is a greater willingness to identify publicly as Jews than there was before World War II. The paradoxical result, Cohen suggests, is that France's more than 700,000 Jews seem "more and more assimilated in French society at the same time that there have been many more public manifestations of Jewish identity."

This movement toward a reaffirmation of Jewish identity has a political dimension in support for the state of Israel. A cultural dimension connected with memories of the Holocaust has spurred a revival of interest in Jewish history. A religious dimension has been accompanied by a return to some traditional practice.

Following the extermination of more than 80,000 French Jews by the Nazis, the traumatized community found hope and pride in the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. An intellectual and religious renewal grew up under the influence of such major figures as Andre Neher, Emmanuel Levinas and Leon Askenazi, whose modemized Jewish thinking began to reach a larger public.

But it was Israel's victory in the 1967 Six-day War, which was popular with the French as a whole, that solidified the sense that Jewish identity includes a special attachment to Israel.

The reaffirmation of Jewish pride, however, has led to a sharpening of the memory of genocide and a renewed interest in Jewish culture. The opening of the Rachi center in Paris in 1973 brought together a public anxious to pursue these concerns, which were further stimulated by the books of Elie Wiesel, Andre Schiwartz-Bart's The Last of the Just, and Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour film, "Shoah."

With the collapse of leftist hopes, many who had put their faith in revolutionary politics began to reevaluate Jewish tradition in more positive terms. The flood of long-delayed disclosures regarding the Vichy government and its complicity in the Holocaust raised fundamental questions: Was Vichy only a tragic exception in French history? What is the place of the Jews in the national memory?