The Unwritten Rule

A few weeks before this summer’s eruption of violence in Israel and against the Jews of Paris, I attended a dinner of mostly secular young Jews at a private home in a well-to-do Parisian suburb. Graduates of the country’s elite educational institutions, they were now, in their late twenties or early thirties, well launched on sterling careers in industry, politics, and the French civil service. The mood was jovial, the food and wine superb, the air thick with insider political gossip. Cultivated and public-service minded, the group seemed to personify the opportunities open to individual Jews in France’s national life today.

And yet, as this was a private event where Jews met other Jews, conversation inevitably turned without prompting to the “situation.” While this entailed oblique acknowledgements of “difficulties” for Jews in particular, the company tended to submerge these in the wider national malaise. “Over the last decades our institutions have eroded, and people have really very little in which to believe,” one defense-ministry official suggested. “These young men, immigrants or not, isolated in their small apartments—looking out, they see the Jews, surrounded by family and friends on the High Holy Days, and they get jealous and enraged.”

The implication? Strengthen the economy, revive French political life, and the problem of anti-Semitism will be solved or at least attenuated. A young economist went further. Referring to Jews by the absurd 19th-century designation “français de confession israélite” (as if one’s Judaism were reducible to where one said “confession”), he averred that France was “not at all anti-Semitic, no matter how many times Americans say so. We have problems of integration, of growth. But aside from a small minority, no one pays attention to your religion. It poses no obstacles.”