French Jewish ‘safe haven’ doesn’t look so safe anymore

MICHAEL BELLING

PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL BELLING

In his talk, titled “Charlie Hebdo and the new face of anti-Semitism”, Green, a professor of religious studies and international director of the project, Sephardi Voices, said that for French Jews, three-quarters of whom fled North Africa, France was always considered a safe haven.

Numbering 500 000, the French Jews are the second largest Diaspora community after the United States, and comprise almost one per cent of the French population today.

Rising anti-Semitism over the past decade – “feeding off the debris that sweeps out of the Middle East” and the recent Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, “France’s 9/11, has shaken their roots,” he told the audience.

France has a Muslim population of nearly five million. “Staggering poverty, segregation and unemployment, are the trinity for the overwhelming majority.” Much of the anti-Semitism comes from this part of the population.

“Insecurity, fear and unpredictability have become the new normal for Jews of France. In 2014, 51 per cent of all racist attacks targeted Jews.”

“To understand what is happening in France is to understand the Sephardi Jewish experience,” Green said referring to the rise of Jew hatred there. Green has devoted himself to collecting the stories of the “forgotten exodus” of Jews from North Africa and the Middle East, in a similar way to Steven Spielberg’s chronicling of the tales of Holocaust survivors.

Within the space of a generation after 1948, over 850 000 Sephardi Jews were displaced from their countries in which Jewish communities had lived for centuries, even thousands of years, half of them from the North African Maghreb.

“There has been minimal activity in collecting their personal narratives, galvanising communities to voice their concerns about communal and cultural loss and disseminating their experiences,” he said.

“Their stories are heartbreaking and filled with trauma.”

Their displacement “cannot be reduced to anti-Israel venom,” he said. It began earlier than 1948 with the “acidic fertilisers” of the rise of Nazism and Arab nationalist mobilisation. In the early 1940s, many were killed in Iraq in Nazi-inspired violence and Jews were sent to concentration camps from Tunisia.

After 1948 “state-legislated discrimination and repressive measures made life increasingly untenable for Jews in Islamic lands. Riots, arrests and detentions and discriminatory decrees became routine and are well documented”.

These measures included stripping Jews of citizenship, declaring Zionism a crime, freezing assets and confiscation of property.

As a result, the Jews left in droves and by 2005, the total Jewish population in Islamic countries in the Middle East had fallen to just over 5 000.

What happened to the Sephardim was a human rights story, said Green. This enabled Sephardi Voices to approach governments and other official bodies. It was also a story of Zionism.

Most of the displaced Jews went to Israel, but large numbers emigrated to France from the former French colonies in North Africa.

Green said he felt the outlook for French Jews was pessimistic. Some had forecast that up to half of French Jewry might emigrate over the next generation unless the situation returned to normal.