JI belong to a generation of Jews, born after the war, for whom, from adolescence, being left-wing was obvious.
I belong to a generation that viscerally hated everything that even remotely related to the extreme right, and in whose eyes Israel represented first and foremost the refuge that had been lacking for our victimized parents and grandparents. of Nazism, even though we did not hide the sympathy that the Palestinians inspired in us.
I belong to a generation where being Jewish and French meant naturally loving Maximilien Robespierre and the Revolution of 1789, Louise Michel and the Paris Commune, Emile Zola, Léon Blum, Missak Manouchian and Jean-Paul Sartre.
I belong to a generation where the Jews, because of the suffering they had endured over the centuries, seemed to us more than ever to have to offer the face of tolerance, solidarity, and culture, too.
Cohesion shattered
Obviously, in the distant era that I am talking about, not all French Jews shared these same references and these same values. But, regardless of their convictions and beliefs, they all had at least three strong memories in common: anti-Dreyfus abjection, Pétainist indignity and the horror of the Shoah. This was already a lot and it made it possible to debate everything else together, in strong opposition, but without tearing each other apart, including within the very conservative Representative Council of Jewish Institutions (CRIF).
Today, unfortunately, all this is a thing of the past and the French Jewish community is definitively fractured. By an incredible sleight of hand, Marine Le Pen succeeded in making thousands of Jews forget the neofascist ideology of her movement, created in particular by those nostalgic for Nazism and collaboration, and Eric Zemmour completed his work, definitively pulverizing everything which had until then made it possible to maintain a little coherence and cohesion in the French Jewish community.
Much has been said about Zemmour’s comments on Pétain, “savior of Jews”, but those he held on Dreyfus attracted less attention. This was not the only time when Zemmour publicly teased anti-Semites: he had defended Maurice Papon, convicted of complicity in crimes against humanity; he had proposed abolishing the Gayssot law, which punishes the crime of Holocaust denial; he had cast shame on the Jewish children murdered by Mohammed Merah because their family had buried them in Israel…
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