We are still in shock over the murders by Islamic terrorists a week and a half ago of Yoav Hattab, Yohan Cohen, Philippe Braham and François-Michel Saada as they were doing some last-minute shopping before Shabbat. Those killings, along with the attacks at the offices of Charlie Hebdo have been a wake-up call. Much soul-searching is taking place in France, and around the world.
It seems that some people outside of the Jewish community are finally recognizing that there is a connection between antisemitic attitudes and rhetoric and terrorism – that ignoring the former will invariably lead to the latter.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared last week that “France without Jews is not France.” To back up this sentiment, he announced on Monday that 10,000- military troops would be deployed to protect sensitive sites, and that 4,700 police officers would protect Jewish schools and synagogues.
At the rally in Paris last Sunday of a million and a half people, in addition to signs declaring “Je suis Charlie,” there were some that read “Je suis Juif.” I am Jewish.
I imagine it must be at least somewhat reassuring to French Jews to have both the leaders of the country as well as some of its citizens taking their safety seriously and making commitments to protect them because they recognize that French Jews are citizens of the country who make up an important and integral part of the national fabric.
Not everyone is so hopeful. On Sunday, Prime Minister Netanyahu, attending the rally in Paris, explicitly invited the Jews of France to move to Israel. “Israel is your home,” he said. This was not the first time that an Israeli leader urged French Jews to make aliyah. In 2012, at a joint press conference with President Francois Hollande, Netanyahu said: “In my role as Prime Minister of Israel, I always say to Jews, wherever they may be, I say to them: Come to Israel and make Israel your home.”
It has not only been Netanyahu. At a ceremony in 2004 welcoming new immigrants from France, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon advised French Jews to “move immediately” to Israel to escape “the wildest antisemitism” in France.
The French were not pleased then either.
There is something of a rhetorical tug of war going on here between those who say that “France without Jews is not France,” and those who claim that there is no future for Judaism there.
This is not the first time the Jewish people have faced this question. In this morning’s Torah portion, Va-era, there is also a tug of war over the future of the children of Israel. At the opening of the parashah, they are enslaved in Egypt. God has identified Moses as the prophet who will carry the message “Let my people go” to Pharaoh and lead the Israelites out of slavery and to the Promised Land.
Not everyone wants to see the Israelites leave, however. Pharaoh and his court, certainly, do not want to see their enslaved workforce disappear. The Israelites themselves are skeptical of Moses’ insistence that God is going to lead them away. They prefer an enslaved life that they know to an uncertain life of freedom.
God knows, however, that there is no future for Israel in the land of Egypt.
God hears the groaning of the Israelites and remembers the commitment made to their ancestors generations before. God promised Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that their offspring would be as numerous as the stars and would one day inherit the land of Israel. They would be a blessing to the world. This is a destiny that cannot be fulfilled by slaves in a foreign land.
God tells Moses:
Say… to the Israelite people… I will free you from the labors of the Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and through extraordinary chastisements. And I will take you to be My people, and I will be your God. (Exodus 6:6-7)
These four verbs – “I will free you, I will deliver you, I will redeem you, and I will take you” – are the four stages of redemption that our Passover Seder identifies as the basis of the four cups of wine.
In this redemption, freedom is only part of God’s promise. God also means to build a covenantal relationship with the Jewish people. Central to that covenant is the establishment of a Jewish society in the Promised Land. Only then can the Jewish people become what God has intended for them to become. Only then will they realize their potential and flourish.
This tug of war in the Torah between slavery and freedom, between Egypt and Israel, is black and white. In the millennia since our ancestors first became free, the question of where the Jewish people can best flourish has been more complicated. Maimonides, fleeing persecution in Spain and then Morocco, made his way to the land of Israel. There, he found a backwards Jewish community in which he did not see a future. So he kept going South and settled in the thriving Jewish community of Fustat, Egypt.
We are a people that is both rooted in our Promised Land, and capable of bringing our faith and identity with us wherever we go. We have been successful at it, developing tight-knit communities whose members support one another and are a force for good in their surrounding environments.
Part of the importance of the State of Israel today is that it truly functions as the homeland of the Jewish people. Robert Frost said “Home is the place where, if you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Israel is that home for Jews, wherever we happen to be living right now.
Since the establishment of Israel in 1948, it has opened its doors to refugees from the Holocaust, masses of Jews fleeing pogroms in North Africa and the Middle East, Jews of the Former Soviet Union and Ethiopia. “Welcome home,” Israel said.
So what of the Jews of France today?
The Jewish community in France is significant. There are an estimated 500,000 Jews living in France. The is the largest community in Europe and the third largest in the world. It is a diverse, cosmopolitan community, comprised of Jews across the religious spectrum – from secular to ultra-Orthodox, and everything in between.
The last few years have seen a rise in acts of antisemitism. This has led to increasing numbers of French Jews deciding to move to Israel. Last year, nearly 7,000 French Jews made aliyah, more than double the previous year. With continued anti-Jewish violence, that number is expected to be even higher this year, perhaps as many as 10,000.
When we consider the long history of Judaism in France, it is particularly sad that the community finds itself facing so much pressure now, because France has really come a long way.
The first Jews probably arrived about 2,000 years ago. Attracted by economic opportunities, they did well in the early middle ages. Charlemagne embraced the Jews, seeing them as a blessing to his kingdom.
The Crusades brought new attitudes across Europe. Rulers stoked antisemitism, and peasants took out their frustrations on their vulnerable Jewish neighbors.
The persecutions began around the year 1000 CE. Jewish communities were often confronted with the choice of conversion to Christianity, death, or exile. Several waves of expulsions took place in 1182, 1306, and 1394. Jews often had property and assets seized, or debt owed to them cancelled. Blood libel accusations were frequent.
Don’t think, however, that it was all bad – that the middle ages were centuries upon centuries of pure suffering. Also during this time, there were Jewish communities that thrived, enjoying prosperity and cultural flowering. Some of the most important Jewish leaders and thinkers in history came from France.
Rabbi Shlomo ben Yitzchak, more commonly known as Rashi, is the most important commentator of the Torah and Talmud in Jewish history. He lived and taught in Troyes, in Northern France in the eleventh century and gave rise to a school of innovative Jewish thinkers that flourished for several generations.
As the years passed, the Jews of France, as they were everywhere else in the world, were seen as other, and treated as second-class citizens, at best.
By the 1780’s there were approximately 40-50,000 Jews living in France. They had legal status to be there, but with extremely limited rights. They were basically restricted to the money-lending business. Things were changing in Europe, however, especially in France. The Enlightenment had taken hold, and there were finally some Christian voices that were calling for tolerance and acceptance of minorities.
The French Revolution of 1789, with its ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, introduced the notion that all residents of a nation could be considered citizens, regardless of their religious affiliation.
The change was sporadic and haphazard, as the chaos of the revolution proceeded and the Reign of Terror took hold, but the Jews of France recognized that something new was happening, and they were excited about the possibilities. Jewish communities helped fund the revolution, and Jewish soldiers joined the Army of the Republic in its battles against other European countries. Many Jews patriotically gave their lives for the sake of their French homeland.
When Napoleon came to power, he wanted to finally resolve the Jewish question. In 1806, he convened the Assembly of Jewish Notables, naming it the Grand Sanhedrin. Twelve questions were posed to it members, the answers to which would determine the future status of the Jews of France. Those questions included:
• May a Jewess marry a Christian, or [May] a Jew [marry] a Christian woman? or does Jewish law order that the Jews should only intermarry among themselves?
• In the eyes of Jews, are Frenchmen not of the Jewish religion considered as brethren or strangers?
• Do the Jews born in France, and treated by the law as French citizens, acknowledge France as their country? Are they bound to defend it? Are they bound to obey the laws and follow the directions of the civil code?
• What kind of police jurisdiction do the rabbis exercise over the Jews? What judicial power do they exercise over them?
The answers the Assembly gave essentially declared Jews to be French citizens first, and Jews second. Intermarriages would be considered binding. French Jews would consider non-Jews to be their brethren. Jews would consider France to be their fatherland, and would defend it when called upon, etc.
When asked if they wanted to be citizens, with all that it would entail, the Jews of France answered with a resounding “oui.”
In 1807, Napoleon added Judaism as an official religion of France. As his armies moved across Europe, Napoleon liberated Jewish communities of other lands from the ghettos to which they had been restricted.
Emancipation was not yet complete, however. In 1846, the Jews of France became fully equal when the French Supreme Court found the More Judaico, the Jewish oath, rooted in medieval antisemitism, to be unconstitutional. Legally, the Jews of France were now fully French, with rights equal to Catholics and Protestants.
The social reality, however, was quite different. Despite tremendous efforts by Jews to assimilate into French society, antisemitism was still widespread. At the end of the nineteenth century, a traditionalist faction of army officers concocted a plot to frame a young Jewish Captain named Alfred Dreyfus for treason. The subsequent trials were a major political scandal in France that lasted from 1894 – 1906 and that divided the country between the anticlerical, pro-republic Dreyfusards and the pro-army, mostly Catholic anti-Dreyfusards.
Theodore Herzl was a secular Jewish journalist who had grown up in antisemitic Austro-Hungary and moved to France due to what he perceived as its progressive, humanist values. He was a strong proponent of Jewish assimilation into European culture as the solution to the Jewish problem, which had become “an obsession for him.” (Dictionary of the Dreyfus affair, Nichol, p. 505.) Herzl’s coverage of the Dreyfus Affair in 1895, however, led him to conclude that Jews would never be accepted by the non-Jewish world. As much as Jews had given up to become citizens, they would never be seen as equals.
In his book, Der Judenstaat, Herzl writes:
If France – bastion of emancipation, progress and universal socialism – [can] get caught up in a maelstrom of antisemitism and let the Parisian crowd chant ‘Kill the Jews!’ Where can they be safe once again – if not in their own country? Assimilation does not solve the problem because the Gentile world will not allow it as the Dreyfus affair has so clearly demonstrated.
Herzl subsequently founded the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897, creating Zionism as a political movement and laying the foundation for the reestablishment of a Jewish homeland in the land of Israel. If the Gentile world is incapable of accepting Jews as equals, Jews will have to establish a land of their own where they constitute a majority and are free to determine their own fate.
At the beginning of World War Two, there were 350,000 Jews living in France, a number of them having fled Germany in the 1930’s. During the Holocaust, one fifth of France’s Jewish population were murdered by the Nazis, often with the collaboration of French officials and citizens. There were also many enlightened French who saved Jews. France has the third highest number of people honored as Righteous Among the Nations among any country.
Between 1948 and 1967, France was a strong supporter of Israel, with close military ties. The Israeli nuclear reactor in Dimona was built with significant assistance from the French government in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Israeli Air Force pilots flew French fighter jets in the Six Day War in 1967.
By the end of the twentieth century, France’s population had among the most favorable attitudes towards Jews of any country in Europe.
The resurgence of anti-Semitism over the last fifteen years has come from a non-traditional source. While there are still antisemitic attitudes from those on the far right and the far left, the rise in anti-Jewish activity has been attributed mainly to increasing violence by people in the French Muslim community. Flare-ups have tended to occur especially when there is political tension in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In addition to the terrorist attack on the Hypercacher grocery store, there have been other murders, acts of vandalism, attacks against synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses, anti-Jewish demonstrations and chants, and more.
That is why French Jews are increasingly nervous, why French emigration is up, and why real estate prices in Israel are soaring.
I am not French, but I doubt that we are going to see a mass Exodus of the entire Jewish community of France to Israel. I hope and pray that there is a thriving future for the Jews of France.
Like you, I am extremely concerned for our Jewish brothers and sisters who had to cancel Shabbat services at some synagogues last week and who require police and military presence at all of their institutions. I hope that this wake-up call to the French people will lead to action, will help them realize that the Jewish people are the proverbial canary in the coal mine, because the Prime Minister is correct when he says “France without Jews is not France.”
Rebyehoshua 