The threat to France’s Jews

 

Rough-hewn and reminiscent of one of Giacometti’s lonely figures, the weathered bronze soldier in the middle of a tiny, shady square in the heart of Paris stands stiffly to attention, with the jagged blade of his broken sword pointing like a dagger up to the sky. The statue’s disproportionately tiny head, topped with its disarmingly jaunty military hat, looks almost comical. Called Homage to Captain Dreyfus, it was created in 1986 by the political satirist Louis Mitelberg, known as TIM, and intended for the courtyard of Paris’s École Militaire, the official headquarters of the French army. It was there that Alfred Dreyfus, convicted of treason, was subject to a military humiliation in 1895, his insignia ripped from his uniform and his sword broken in front of a crowd of thousands of jeering Parisians shouting “Death to the Jews!”

 

But in 1986, the army, whose upper echelons still contained officers unwilling to accept Dreyfus’s 1906 rehabilitation, was not amused by the bitterly mocking tone of Mitelberg’s bronze soldier, standing to attention at the behest of an army of fools. With the backing of President François Mitterrand, the army refused to accept the statue when it was completed, and it languished in storage until it was erected two years later in the Tuileries gardens. There, with pleasing historical symmetry, it was placed within spitting distance of the statue of another famous French Jew, three times prime minister Leon Blum. But in 1994, Dreyfus, or at least his statue, was moved again, this time to the Place Pierre Lafue, off the Boulevard Raspail, where it still stands. It is regularly daubed with offensive graffiti, a reminder that antisemitism still thrives even in the smartest and most sophisticated of Parisian enclaves. A full size replica of the statue stands in the courtyard of Paris’s Museum of Jewish Art and History.

 

The irony of the statue’s peregrinations stands as a metaphor, albeit an imperfect one, for the situation of France’s Jews today: facing regular episodes of antisemitic violence, but caught between a fear of what future exists for Jews in their beloved country and a confidence that the French Republic, whose values they have embraced, will keep them safe. After last week’s atrocious events in Paris, which claimed the lives of 17 innocent people including journalists, two policemen and a policewoman, a maintenance worker and four Jewish shoppers at a kosher supermarket, France, home to the largest Jewish population in Europe – somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 people – faces a brutal reckoning about the future of its second largest ethno-religious minority. Figures published in December show that last year, for the first time ever, more Jews moved to Israel from France than from any other country in the world – around 7,000, or more than 1% of the Jewish population in France – double the number in 2013. Others left the country for the UK, but also to the US, Canada and elsewhere in Europe. There are no precise figures of how many Jews left France in 2014, since France does not collect census information regarding religion and is surprisingly desultory about data regarding emigration, but it is probably in the region of around 2% of the overall Jewish population, a huge increase on all previous years.

 

This dramatic increase in the number of Jews moving from France to Israel had already become the subject of international discussion before last week – with some commentators going so far as to invoke the spectre of Fascism during the 1930s. It is almost as though the fate of French Jewry is seen as a cipher for widespread, even existential, fears about the future of Europe itself. While it is emphatically not the case, as one concerned Jewish observer in England tweeted this week, that every single French Jew is working out how to leave, the situation is clearly cause for concern – not only for Jews but for France, and for Europe as well... Read more.

 

Source : http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/jan/15/-sp-threat-to-france-jews