Nobody in Paris can be said to be calm about the biggest explosion of civil unrest in France for 20 years. What began with the shooting by traffic cops of Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old French-Arab with immigrant parents — one of a shocking 17 drivers shot dead by police in the past 18 months — exploded into five nights of rioting, looting and rage.
Spreading across France, rioters from the underprivileged and racially mixed banlieues — the fringes of the country’s prosperous and elegant cities — torched cars, looted shops and targeted town halls, the homes of mayors and state-owned properties or symbols of all kinds.
The statistics are horrifying: more than 5,000 vehicles burned, 3,400 arrests, 1,000 buildings damaged or looted, 250 police stations or gendarmeries attacked and more than 700 police officers injured.
But French Jews woke from the madness more nervous than most. Not only was the Holocaust Memorial in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre, the epicentre of the rioting, defaced by anti-police and anti-government slogans, but Jewish shops were ransacked in the community hub of Sarcelles, an ethnically mixed banlieue itself, also on the edge of Paris. Clips circulating on social media showed graffiti warning “we will make you a Shoah” and recorded cries of “death to the Jews”. The deep seam of banlieue antisemitism, while not central, had indeed reared its head.
“What does it mean for the Jews?” is, in Paris this week, not a comic question. So far, community leaders have been keen to point out that, unlike in the 2014 riots, the properties of Jews caught up in the rioting do not seem to have been targeted simply for being Jewish. Instead, the kosher supermarket and orthodox wig shop in Sarcelles that were devastated were part of wider, indiscriminate mayhem. This was a relief to a community which in 2014 saw multiple synagogues targeted by rioters. But in an indication of pessimistic expectations, this in itself is considered positive news for the Jews.
