Opinion
To be a Jew here is no longer a statement of pride. For my family, this is the end of history
January 15, 2015 12:52
3 min read
Je suis un Juif Francais. There is no tension in that statement. Faith and nation co-exist in perfect harmony. All my life I have said those words without a trace of irony, or regret.
No more. Something has broken in the bond between France and its Jews. Our freedom, equality and brotherhood are signified from this week by soldiers at the gates of our schools, by a synagogue shut on the Sabbath because the state cannot guarantee its security. To be Jew in France is no longer a statement of pride.
For my family, this is the end of history. We trace our roots back three centuries, to a village on the outskirts of Strasbourg. My ancestor, Grand Rabbin of the Lower Rhine, preached in pure French and fought to his death to maintain Orthodoxy against a state Consistoire dominated by Reform.
The Grand Rabbin's pulpit in Colmar has a winding staircase, as in a church, and a belfry in the rooftop. The Republic, building synagogues for its Jewish citizens, thought they would need to be summoned by bells.
Our family tree boasts fabulous names - Eugénie, Théophraste, Palmyre, Angélique, Gracieuse - each with a Hebrew equivalent. Our great-uncles, many of them rabbis, were people I learned to tell apart by vocation. As a small boy I was introduced to Oncle Salomon-docteur, Oncle Salomon-avocat.
At the Front he never omitted to wrap the talit around his French uniform
The rights and duties of a Jew here were impressed on us in infancy. One laid a formal table for breakfast. One learned which wine to serve with fish and which with fowl. One washed hands before kiddush on Friday night, not after. One spoke French.
Before he left for Israel in 1992, I took my Uncle René to the opera at the Bastille. The Jews in France invented grand opera - Meyerbeer, Halévy - and comic opera with Offenbach. Culture was innate to our identity.
One morning I went to the kitchen to put on a kettle. René shouted at me as if I had violated one of the 613 precepts. A Jew in France did not make his own coffee. He went down to the café in the street and drank it standing up.
When the Germans invaded in 1870 most of our family left Alsace-Lorraine, refusing to live under any flag but the tricolor. We founded an orthodox synagogue in Paris, on rue Cadet, at the back of the Folies-Bergère. A memorial board lists members of our family who gave their lives for France - who "fell on the field of honour" in two world wars, more than 20 by my count. My Aunt Fifi, born on August 2, 1914, never married; most French Jewish men of her generation were exiled or murdered.
The day before she was born, my grandfather went to the Front, for the full four years, never omitting to wrap a Jewish talit around his French uniform at morning prayers.
In the Second War great-uncle Samuel was shot dead in the street by a German soldier. Other relatives were deported. My grandparents fled south, surviving by luck, wit and savoir-faire. Uncle René went underground with the Résistance. Peacetime or war, our loyalty to France was absolute.
The 1960s immigration from North Africa, decried by conservatives as the end of the old France, was welcomed by our family for its reinforcement of traditional Judaism. Uncle René, unhappy at the strictures of a yeshiva-trained rabbi at Rue Cadet, formed a minyan with Moroccans and Tunisians, the nusach determined by whoever led the service. Paris briefly promised a Jewish renaissance.
But social tensions stemming from the banlieus, and a political climate soured from 1967 by France's failed love affair with Israel, clouded the joys of being a Jew in France. Steadily, we departed; René was the last to go.
Recent events - the lack of public outrage over attacks on Jews in schools, in kosher restaurants, in their homes - left Jews feeling insecure, confused and disenfranchised.
A Strasbourg musician now in Israel, Arielle Alvarez-Pereyre, says: "I don't understand how much longer it will be possible to be French. Yes, I miss France. The one that taught us democracy, respect, brotherhood, Republic. The one where baguette and newspaper were the attributes of a French man, not a rifle and hatred. The one where being French meant being free. The France I hear, see and taste, is nothing near the France I was born in."
The loss is immense. Nowhere in the world did Jews feel so much a part of the nation as in France. Nowhere were we so free to develop our consciousness as Jews and to contribute of that confidence to the life of the nation. The France we mourn was the first in continental Europe to have a Jewish prime minister, Leon Blum. It is the France of the Rothschilds, the Ephrussis, the makers of Citroen; of the philosophers Levinas, Derrida, Claude Lévi-Strauss; of Serge Gainsbourg and Sacha Distel. It is the France of Proust, André Maurois and Patrick Modiano.
When the present prime minister, Manuel Valls, announced that a France without its Jews is no longer France he spoke no more than the historic truth. Valls, above his president, has fought to preserve the bond. I pray for him to succeed. I pray that I never have to say: Je ne suis plus un juif francais.
