What is happening in France is very worrying, and not just for Jews. Anti-Semitism, whether cynically proclaimed by a few thugs (rappers in search of an audience, mediocre polemicists, talentless comedians), or cowardly assumed by certain leaders of supposedly democratic political parties in full moral and ideological disarray (I want to name them here: EELV and LFI), threatens more than a community accustomed to such misfortunes. If it is allowed to spread, anti-semitism will destroy French society as a whole.
To understand it, we need to recall its roots: for millennia, the Jews have been blamed for bringing the idea of a single god for all humans and all living creatures; for making Jerusalem sacred by appropriating it for themselves; and for enriching themselves as praetors. And, as always, we hate the one to whom we owe something, and we have to get angry with him, attributing all the vices to him, to prove to ourselves that we owe him nothing.
These beliefs must first be destroyed: the Jews did not invent monotheism (which began at least with Zoroastrianism), they did not appropriate Jerusalem (they already lived there three thousand years ago), and they only became praetors forced by the tenants of the other monotheistic religions. Finally, if some Jews have recovered a state, lost more than two thousand years ago, it was when the international community proposed that they share this land with their Palestinian neighbors, who refused.
If there’s one thing that Judaism has brought to the world, it’s the valorization of moral, economic, social and environmental progress; it’s the idea of the common destiny of all human beings; and it’s the revolutionary idea that the scandal is not wealth, if it’s honestly earned, but poverty.
Today, everything is intertwined: the return of fundamentalism in all religions, the refusal to open up to the world, hatred of the rich (justified by the extraordinary worsening of global inequalities), communitarianism (flattered by the most demagogic parties); and the disastrous policies of Israel’s current leaders, who refuse to see the harm done to Judaism and to the State of Israel itself by the transformation of the Middle East’s leading democracy into a theocratic quasi-dictatorship.
What’s more, today’s social networks make it easier to spread false news, and to slander with impunity from countries that don’t extradite anyone.
Those who play with fire, by flattering these deadly impulses, dishonor themselves and gain no advantage. In Israel, this suicidal government will fall and Israeli democracy will flourish again, making peace with all its neighbors and recognizing their equal rights and duties.
We must remember that every anti-Semitic wave precedes a much broader obscurantism. Those who abandoned German Jews to their fate in the 1930s failed to realize that they would be next on the list of victims. And today, at the dawn of times that could once again become barbaric, all those who believe in reason, justice, democracy and morality must unite against anti-Semitism.
j@attali.com
Image: Christian Guémy.