Language:
French
Year of publication:
2009
Titel der Quelle:
Controverses; revue d'idees
Angaben zur Quelle:
10 (2009) 12-31
Keywords:
Antisemitism History 1945-
;
Jews
;
Judaism Relations
;
Islam
;
Islam Relations
;
Judaism
;
Jews Identity
Abstract:
Studies how the symbolism of the Jew has been utilized and gradually turned against the Jews in France since the 1980s. Traces the dissociation of the word "Jew" from flesh and blood Jews back to Paul, who substituted the Jews with Christians. In the late 1980s, following Francois Mitterand's revival of the "anti-fascist front" in the struggle against Le Pen, the anti-racist organization SOS-Racisme began to equate Jews with immigrants, and gradually all the Jewish symbols were confiscated for the immigrant cause. Thus began the "perverse logic", by which the Jews were excluded from their own history and then from general history. In the 1990s "human-rightism" began to stigmatize the uniqueness of the Shoah and the Jewish community's identification with it. The fight against antisemitism was extended to protect the immigrants against anti-Arab racism. By the end of the 20th century, the relationship between the symbolism of the Jew and that of the Arab-Muslim had been reversed in favor of the latter; everything related to the Jews or Judaism had to be linked to Islam or Muslim immigrants in order to receive confirmation. Since 2000 the French Arab-Muslim community has become a political actor, skillfully applying the Jewish symbol to itself. The cause of the suffering Palestinians (the "new Jews") has become its rallying point, but the steady decline of the Jewish symbol is making it increasingly redundant. The period following the Gaza war in 2008-09 is characterized by the exclusion of the Jewish symbol. Warns that this unconscious and unprogrammed development may lead to delegitimization of the existing Jewish community.
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