Following an Islamic State terrorist’s attack on a French kosher supermarket in 2015, Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared that if his Jewish compatriots were to leave the country en masse, “France would not be France.” Yet there are no sign things are getting better, with 2018 seeing a 74-percent increase in assaults on Jews since the previous year. Jews also continue to leave the country, though the numbers are down since the 2014 high-water mark. But, writes Robert Zaretsky, citing a recent study, the statistics don’t tell the whole story:
Rather than leaving France for Israel, large numbers of French Jews are instead leaving suburban for urban France. In particular, French Jews are gravitating toward the capital. Jewish centers and synagogues in Parisian suburbs like Saint Denis and Clichy-sous-Bois, home to growing numbers of North African [Muslim] immigrants, have registered sharp membership declines. These individuals and families have, by and large, moved either to neighborhoods inside Paris or to a select number of so-called safe suburbs like Le Raincy and Sarcelles, known as la petite Jérusalem. While the shift partly reflects motivations shared by non-Jews—such as the quest for better schools and opportunities for one’s children—[the authors of the study] believe the principal driver is the chronic sense of insecurity that Jewish parents feel.
Paradoxically, these families are moving closer to Paris but further from France—or at least from a certain idea of France. Rather than rallying to an embattled French Republic built on secular and universal principles, these Jewish families are retreating into their religious identity by enrolling their children in Jewish rather than public schools.
Meanwhile, much as at the beginning of the 20th century, when anti-Semitism became a unifying force for a French right-wing, anti-republican movement, it has once again become a powerful social and political force:
[P]olitical theorists like Pierre-André Taguieff maintain that something new . . . is afoot: an ideology that combines traditional anti-Semitic claims with more recent anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian commitments. Sociologists, including Didier Lapeyronnie, have gathered empirical evidence for this claim, identifying decaying suburbs populated largely by the disaffected offspring of North African immigrants as especially fertile ground for such sentiments. Anti-Semitism, Lapeyronnie observes, makes for the social “cement” that binds together the undereducated and unemployed youths consigned to those areas that constitute, both literally and figuratively, the periphery of Paris.
Read more on Foreign Affairs: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/france/2020-02-04/france-without-jews-no-longer-unthinkable