How the Jewish Issue Brings France Up Against Its Own Reason for Being

Sincere thanks to Ruth Wisse, Joshua Muravchik, and Michel Gurfinkiel for their thoughtful responses to my reflections on the twilight of French Jewry. Together, they raise a number of issues that deserve further clarification.

Both Joshua Muravchik and Michel Gurfinkiel chide me for, in their view, an overly optimistic description of the social and political comfort enjoyed by Jews in France in the long era between the 1789 French Revolution and the beginning of the present century. Everything they say is of course pertinent. My point, however, was not to indulge in historical reconstruction but, sticking to the realm of ideas, to investigate how the Jewish issue brings the French Republic face to face with its own deepest political principles, if not its reason for being.

In the realm of historical facts, we can all agree that the level of anti-Semitism in France has matched that in other West European states. In this sense, indeed, France has never been a “paradise” (my word) for Jews. During World War II, Muravchik reminds us, “one-quarter of the Jews living in France were murdered in the Holocaust, with French connivance.” Nevertheless, it is also a fact that three-quarters of French Jews survived the war, and they did so thanks to the numerous Frenchmen who challenged Nazi and Vichy laws. As real as was French “connivance” with the Nazi occupier, it has to be placed next to the far higher degree of complicity displayed by many other European countries during the war.