For French Jewry, ominous clouds

It’s an article that’s more than 10 years old, but anyone who wants to get an insight into the dynamics of anti-Semitism in France would do well to consult “France’s Scarlet Letter,” published by the journalist Marie Brenner in the June 2003 edition of Vanity Fair.

In that superlative piece, which had at its core a profile of Sammy Ghozlan, the Jewish ex-cop who started his own agency to monitor and expose anti-Semitic incidents, Brenner provided fascinating insight into the class divisions that streak the French Jewish community. Among her cast of characters there was the working class, Algerian-born Ghozlan, who spent his career fighting criminals in the bleak outskirts of Paris; the aristocrat David de Rothschild, a banker with a haute-bourgeois lifestyle who gave Brenner the impression that Jews would do well not to “throw oil on the fire” of anti-Semitism that was starting to engulf the poor Sephardic communities in the suburbs; and Roger Cukierman, former chair of Rothschild bank and president of CRIF, representative body of French Jewry, who, Brenner said, “had the sharpest insights into the anti-Semitic problem, but was cautious by nature.”

Brenner recounted a conversation with Cukierman in which he “snapped” that Ghozlan played a “totally negative function.” Part of the problem for Cukierman was Ghozlan’s tendency, based on his family’s experiences as a Jews in Muslim Algeria, to regard Jews under threat as compelled to choose between le cercueil ou la valise (the coffin or the suitcase). Moreover, in Brenner’s judgement, “Cukierman put the highest premium on respectability and did not want to be considered pro-Zionist.”

Today, as back then, Cukierman remains a respectable, sober figure, but his view of the situation in France has changed so radically that, were Brenner to return to the subject of French anti-Semitism now, she would end up with a dramatically different article.