Has France Really ‘Always Been Antisemitic’?

Has France “always been antisemitic”? That’s what former French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner claimed on October 2.

The answer is, well, yes and no. Outbreaks of antisemitism there certainly have been, as in the 14th century, when Jews in southern France were accused of spreading the Black Death. Jews had lower rates of the disease than others, because they had higher standards of hygiene, but their seeming immunity made them suspected of  being deliberate carriers of the disease. Jews were also accused over the centuries, in France as elsewhere in Europe, of killing Christian children and using their blood in the making of matzos. But there have been periods where antisemitism was not so prevalent. The first steps in the emancipation of French Jewry began during the French Revolution, when they were given legal equally with French citizens. Napoleon closed the ghettos, and gave full political and civil rights to Jews. For most of the 19th century, French antisemitism was held in check. But it emerged again with the trial against Captain Dreyfus, falsely accused of being a spy for Germany and sentenced to a long term on Devil’s Island. The country was split between his supporters, the Dreyfusards, led by the writer Emile Zola and political figures such as Jean Jaurès and Georges Clemenceau, and the antisemitic anti-Dreyfusards, led by Charles Maurras and Édouard Drumont.

More on Kouchner’s assessment can be found here: “‘France has always been antisemitic,’ former French foreign minister says,” by Mathilda Heller, Jerusalem Post, October 22, 2024:

“France has always been antisemitic,” former French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner told Paris Jewish station Radio J on Sunday in a conversation about Israel, the war in Gaza, and French antisemitism.

“Antisemitism is the belief of fools,” Kouchner, who served as foreign minister from 2007 to 2010 under president Nicolas Sarkozy, told the interviewer.

“When there’s nothing to think about, one turns to antisemitism. When there’s any kind of misfortune, one turns to antisemitism. It’s a very profound sickness.”

When asked whether he thought the antisemitism that sparked the Holocaust was happening again, Kouchner replied that “it never really stopped.” Kouchner’s paternal grandparents fled the Russian pogroms and moved to France, only later to be deported to and murdered in Auschwitz.

“France has always been antisemitic,” he continued, adding that hostility had nevertheless increased in the last year.

This comes after the Jewish Community Protection Service told The Jerusalem Post in July that there had been a 1000% increase in recorded incidents of antisemitism in 2023 compared to the previous year, setting a new baseline norm for antisemitism in 2024.

But by limiting his comments to “antisemitism” among the French, Bernard Kouchner misses the main point about the surge in antisemitism in France: it has very little to do with the i traditional right-wing antisemites among the indigenous French, and is almost exclusively a product of the Muslims who have been allowed to settle in such large numbers in France. It was a gang of Muslims who held Ilan Halimi hostage and over several weeks tortured him until he finally died. It was a Muslim who murdered four shoppers at a kosher supermarket in the Porte de Vincennes. It was a Muslim who murdered 65-year-old Sara Halimi, beating her to death and then throwing her out the window. .It was a Muslim who murdered 84-year-old Mireille Knoll, a Holocaust survivor who had known and befriended her killer, who stabbed her eleven times and then set her on fire.. It was a Muslim, Mohamed Merah, who murdered Rabbi Jonathan Sandler and his two small children, Gabriel and Arieh, aged four and five, as well as eight-year-old Miriam Monsonego, outside a Jewish school in Toulouse. It is Muslims who have been attacking Jews on the streets of France. Especially at risk of attack are Orthodox Jews, whose dress and hair make them easily recognizable. .Jewish men in France have taken to wearing hats over their kippahs, and Jewish women no longer wear in public their Star-of-David necklaces.

Part of the reason for this hatred of Jews, he told the interviewer, lies in lack of education; “Many young French people don’t even know what the Holocaust is.”

But many of the Muslim antisemites — whom Kouchner ignores — know what the Holocaust is, but instead of deploring it, they praise it. They post messages on social media praising Hitler and the Nazis for what they did to the Jews.