They are individual attitudes that are difficult to quantify, but they show the reappearance of atavistic fears in an environment of growing threat. For a few days now, the French media has been reporting increasingly frequent self-protection behaviors among members of the Jewish community – some 400,000 people, the largest in Europe – to hide their membership. Something similar has not been experienced since the 30s and 40s of the last century.
One of the simplest measures to avoid becoming a victim of anti-Semitic anger is to remove your name from the intercom and replace it with simple initials. There are those who have removed the mezuza (cylinder or box containing a scroll with two verses from the Torah) attached to the door of the house or on the jamb, a tradition of devout Jewish families. There is even talk of Jews who, when ordering a taxi, give a false name if they fear that theirs could identify them as Hebrews.
It is not known to what extent these behaviors are widespread or not, although there are reasons for maximum vigilance. For years now, French Jews have felt uncomfortable about the growth of anti-Semitism and physical attacks, sometimes fatal. The exodus has not been massive, but it has been a constant flow. In these circumstances, the Hamas attacks of October 7 and Israel's forceful response have triggered the feeling of vulnerability. And the facts speak for themselves. According to the Ministry of the Interior, more than a thousand anti-Semitic acts have been recorded in the last month, leading to the arrest of 482 people, of which 102 are foreigners.
The paradox is that, while the threat against the Jews grows, many Israeli families – estimated at around two thousand – have flown to France in recent weeks to flee the new war against Hamas.
“I am fully aware of the anguish (of French Jews) in the face of the resurgence of anti-Semitic acts,” Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne insisted yesterday in an interview with the France Inter network. “The Government does everything possible to protect them, we are at their side,” added Borne, whose own father – who changed his original surname, Bornstein, to Borne – survived Auschwitz, but committed suicide years later for not having survived trauma.
The Gaza war and its impact on France are the subject of a very intense national debate and not without controversy. During the weekend, three former prime ministers intervened with articles or interviews: Édouard Philippe, Bernard Cazeneuve and Manuel Valls. Reflections by the admired and untouchable Charles de Gaulle have been recovered to highlight French ambiguities on the Jewish question. The LCI network – which has gone from uninterrupted coverage of the Ukraine conflict to reporting almost exclusively on the drama in Gaza – re-broadcast a press conference by De Gaulle from November 1967, a few months after the War of the Six Days, in which he spoke of the Jews as a “dominating people” and described their settlement in Palestinian lands, before and after 1948, as “more or less justifiable.”
The discussion in France about the new crisis in the Middle East and the resurgence of anti-Semitism is contaminated by the internal political confrontation. The right and the extreme right warn that the greatest anti-Semitic danger comes from extremist Islam and from those who, out of electoral interest, give them certain ideological cover, especially La France Insoumise (LFI, radical left), the party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon . The left, for its part, remembers that the extreme right – specifically Marine Le Pen's party, National Rally (RN) – is the historical repository of French anti-Semitism due to its origins, its founders and the benevolence with which they viewed the collaborationist Vichy regime during World War II.
It is not surprising that the proposal of the leader of the Socialist Party, Olivier Faure, last weekend, to organize a large demonstration against anti-Semitism in which he would be welcome, if he wished, even Le Pen's party caused great perplexity. . Hours later, faced with the anger of his left-wing partners, Faure had to back down. Anti-Semitism is, without a doubt, a very delicate issue in France, due to the historical ghosts it awakens and its impact on today's political fray.
