Review

Abstract

Over the last decade, at least 400 antisemitic attacks per year have occurred in France.1 Incidents include the brutal murder of Ilan Halimi in 2006 and, more recently in 2012, the attack on the Ozar HaTorah schoolhouse in Toulouse, when a lone gunman murdered one adult and three children under the age of ten, and critically wounded one teenage boy.2 In the summer of 2014 there were violent demonstrations against Israel, during which Jews were attacked, Jewish businesses were vandalized, and synagogues were targeted.3 Perhaps more insidious than these eruptions of violence is the increased prevalence of antisemitism in French culture and politics. The results of a November 2014 Fondapol survey on the growing presence of antisemitism in France are dire. One quarter of French people believe that Jews have too much power in the economy and finance, and twenty-two percent think Jews have too much power in the media. Thirty-five percent feel that Jews use their status as victims of the Holocaust as leverage for their own interests, sixteen percent believe there is a global Zionist conspiracy, and fourteen percent of France thinks that the anti-Zionist attacks against Jewish communities in 2014 were understandable.4 The 2014 Fondapol results also found that antisemitic attitudes tend to be more prevalent in “three specific subgroups of the French population: the extreme right, the radical left, and the Muslim community—itself an object of considerable animosity in France.”5 One illustration of this phenomenon is the increasing popularity of stand-up comedian Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, whose viciously antisemitic content has resulted in his arrest for violating hate-speech laws—thirty-eight times. He has also been fined for defaming public figures, although he has failed to pay those fines thus far.6 It is worth noting that Dieudonné also ran for Parliament—as a leftist pro-Palestinian candidate, and then as the head of an anti-Zionist party—multiple times.7 Dieudonné is far from alone in his obsession with the “Jewish Question,” as is evidenced by his growing popularity on social media. How are we to understand the source of this increasingly venomous presence of antisemitism in French radicalism?