Published: 12 April 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Knoll’s appalling murder is a sombre reminder of an almost unbearable fact – France is the only country in Europe and the west where Jews are today murdered by their fellow citizens for being Jews; what might with a certain grim irony be called the “French exception”.
In this century alone the roll call is bleak: 23-year old DJ Sébastien Sellam in 2003; 23-year old phone salesman Ilan Halimi in 2006; three Jewish schoolchildren and a teacher in Toulouse in 2012; four hostages (three of whom were Jewish) at the Hypercacher supermarket in January 2015, two days after the murder of 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo offices; pensioner Sarah Halimi, stabbed and thrown from her third floor apartment almost exactly a year ago, on the night of April 3rd 2017; Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll, one week before Pesach 2018.
And that’s not to mention the regular verbal and physical harassment of Jewish adults and children as they go about their lives, the victims of break-ins and robberies and attacks on people and property that are almost commonplace in certain neighbourhoods of Paris and other cities.
In Lyon, in February, a rabbi’s 14-month old baby daughter was burned after acid was poured into her stroller, parked in the hall of the family’s apartment building. An Orthodox Jewish woman recently told me that she did not allow her husband or young sons to go out wearing their kippot for fear that they would be attacked.
France has a problem, and no one knows exactly what to call it, still less how to address it. This is because of the principle of “universalism”, a very French piety, which refuses all forms of particularism, specifically ethnic and religious.
France has a problem, and no one knows exactly what to call it, still less how to address it. This is because of the principle of “universalism”, a very French piety, which refuses all forms of particularism, specifically ethnic and religious.
Universalism is a foundation stone in the edifice of French republicanism; the rejection of all forms of identity politics, called in French “communautarisme,” which could, in this fiercely secular country, legitimately be called the national religion. But the reality is that however lofty its ideals, it has led to the impoverishment of the language needed to discuss issues of anti-Semitism and racism. Debates around religious or ethnic identity and prejudice that have been going on for decades in English-speaking countries remain virtually taboo in France.
In the wake of the march in Mireille Knoll’s memory, social media was awash with various high-profile Jewish figures declaring that they were not marching because Knoll was Jewish but because she could have been “anyone’s” grandmother: in the words of Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur, “I dream of a France that knows that her grandmother was murdered ... and not just ‘mine’. A nation that stands up to horror and does not simply offer condolences to a ‘community’.”
However pretty this sounds, Horvilleur’s words ring hollow, for the truth is that Knoll was killed not because she was a grandmother, but because she was a Jew. Not everybody’s grandmother is Jewish. Unpacking Horvilleur’s statement reveals a notion that is as every bit as perverse as it would be in the US to entreat every white person to appropriate racist crime as if they were its actual target - as if racism were not specific to people of colour.
Horvilleur neatly, if inadvertently, sums up the contortions that French people, Jews in particular, are making as they try to articulate the issue of contemporary anti-Semitism that is playing out on French soil. By no means for the first time, anti-Semitism is revealed as being buttressed right up against the furthest limits of French universalism.
Knoll’s murder took place in the wake of a recent controversy swirling around the republication of three viciously anti-Semitic works by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, written between 1937 and 1941. Since the author’s death in 1961 his now centenarian widow had respected Céline’s own wishes that the books remain out of print, until a Canadian publisher decided to bring out a new edition and she and the celebrated publishing house Gallimard concluded there was no reason that they should not profit from the new editions of the books as well.
It wasn’t long before officialdom weighed in, with Antoine Gallimard, the head of the company, under pressure from all sides, including President Macron, to drop the project.
For the time being, publication of the three books has been “suspended”. But the debate was a reminder, if one were needed, that France is still grappling with both the memory and the present, concrete reality of anti-Semitism. French republican rhetoric and “universal” values do not erase the reality of racial hatred; what they do instead is make it particularly difficult to talk about, and thus to work towards ways of confronting and resolving, the deep and persistent anti-Semitism that still cleaves to French culture and society.
Photo: March in Paris after Mireille Knoll's murder (Gonzalo Fudentes/Reuters)
