Contacted for a broadcast for the podcast "Heretics", the historian of the "Jewish worlds" of the 19th and 20th centuries Georges Bensoussan preferred a written interview, published in two parts on the site Common Places et Heretics June 12 and 22, 2023.
He is questioned here, first, as the initiator of the inaugural book The Lost Territories of the Republic: Anti-Semitism, Racism and Sexism in Schools (2002) followed, fifteen years later, by A Submissive France – The Voices of Refusal. Both denounced with dismay the meteoric advance of barbaric or learned obscurantism under the guise of tolerance and "anti-racism". But here it is also the man accused of "racial hatred" who speaks out, acquitted after a witchcraft trial supervised by the French state and reported in A French Exile. A Historian Facing Justice (2021), which marks an important step in the institution of an Orwellian thoughtcrime. Finally, it is his view of the evolution of our society that is solicited, a vigilant gaze always directed towards the little people, the rank and file, the anonymous, never innocent but always eternal victims of those who want to write history without them – that is to say against them – by paving it with good intentions.
The following interview, erudite and abundant, will irritate or stimulate, scandalize or awaken: the question is no longer so much, and unfortunately, to report the agreements or the divergences (we have many, many of them, which would all have deserved other discussions) but to know if such points of view and their honest discussion are still conceivable. And for how long.
Common Places: Let's start with a simple question: what about the evolution of anti-Semitism in France?
Georges Bensoussan: Anti-Semitism follows a more or less regular cyclical evolution. This lapidary response suggests that it is an endless cycle, which is highly probable when we try to elucidate the genesis of anti-Semitism, that in which it constitutes a passion constitutive of two great areas of civilization, Western civilization marked by Christianity in all its forms and Arab-Muslim civilization emphasizing the Arab dimension of Islam.
If we consider, for example, the evolution of anti-Semitism in France since the Second Empire more than 150 years ago, we see at work this cyclical functioning that makes the Second Empire a golden age for French Judaism, the era when "Franco-Judaism" crystallized, from Joseph Salvador to Samuel Cahen among others. The age of an emancipation of which one of the main achievements was the creation in 1860 of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. This rather happy period was followed by an anti-Semitic surge between 1880 and the end of the century, the peak of which was obviously the Dreyfus affair, which remains incomprehensible without taking into account the anti-Semitic ferment of the 1880s which saw, among other things, the enormous bookstore success of Jewish France by Edouard Drumont in 1886 and then the launch, thanks to the money earned, of the daily newspaper Free speech in 1892, several years before the Dreyfus affair.
Continuing with the idea of cycles, you see that from the 1900s onwards, anti-Semitism declined in French society and was further reduced with the Great War, which marked a form of integration into the nation, as shown in particular by the evolution of Barrès and his "spiritual families", and the famous image of the rabbi giving last rites to a Catholic soldier dying on the battlefield. This lull lasted until the beginning of the XNUMXs. It was followed by a revival of anti-Semitic fever that lasted until the end of the Second World War, and even a little beyond. A period of anti-Jewish passion illustrated, among other things, by the success of Céline's pamphlets, especially the first Trivia for a massacre in 1937. At the beginning of the Occupation, between the summer of 1940 and the summer of 1942, public opinion was marked by the presence (and on this all the testimonies agree) of a latent, powerful anti-Semitism, a background atmosphere, a sort of doxa that attributed to the "Jews" a large part of the responsibility for the defeat of June 1940. At that time, it was a commonplace to attack "the Jews". Against them, the violence of the Vichy government met with a favorable response from public opinion. Or, at best, indifference. And rarely, but they did exist, were there testimonies of solidarity. It was necessary to wait for the great deportations of 1942, in particular the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup in Paris in July 1942, for public opinion to begin to question itself and waver (a little) in its certainties. And again...
After the war, from the 1950s onwards, a period of decline in anti-Semitism began for a good thirty years, despite occasional outbreaks of fever linked to the modernisation of the country and the precariousness of a certain number of lives. I am thinking of the Poujadist fever of the 1950s as well as the manifestations of anti-Semitism at the opening of the Eichmann trial (April 1961), feverish outbursts that reflect this cultural background that is part of French identity and which is evidenced by the famous phrase of General de Gaulle who, in a press conference held in November 1967, referred to the State of Israel as the Jewish people (and not the Israeli people, which should be noted), as "an elite people, sure of itself and domineering", words that are part of the most classic anti-Jewish clichés shared by a majority of the French population in the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries.
The fact remains that over the long period of the "second 300th century", the community of Jews in France was greatly expanded by the arrival of a portion of Jews from North Africa (almost all the Jews of Algeria, a small half of the Jews of Tunisia and a minority of Moroccan Jews to which must be added a handful of Egyptian Jews). Numbering around 000 people before the war, the "Jewish community of France" doubled in size in the 1990s. There is no doubt that anti-Semitic prejudices have since greatly diminished in French society. This can be seen, for example, in the questionnaires that deal with the possibility of appointing or electing a Jewish Prime Minister or President of the Republic. We go from massive rejection in the 1950s to residual rejection (around 20%) in the 1990s. This is the time when, in April 1990, in Le Figaro, Annie Kriegel writes that the Jews of France have never lived so happily.
It was in the 1990s that the first signs of a revival of anti-Semitism emerged. It was still limited to what are now called, antiphrasis, "sensitive neighborhoods" and to a fraction of the population with an immigrant background. It was at the time of the first Gulf War (1991) that these first signs were confirmed, particularly during the hunt for Islamist circles in the following years. I am thinking in particular of the terrorist actions committed in France in 1995 by Khaled Kelkal. I am thinking of his rabid anti-Semitic convictions that, a few months before his death, an interview conducted by a German journalist had brought to light.
LC: Could you detail how the shift from Christian and Western anti-Semitism to Muslim anti-Semitism took place?
GB: If there is a shift, it is a demographic shift, namely that Islam, and in particular the Arab component of Islam, a negligible quantity in Europe in the 1950s, has become an essential religious and cultural component of the Old Continent, particularly in France, where the largest Muslim community in Europe is gathered. But we must also take into account Germany and Turkish Islam, the United Kingdom and the Islam of the Indian subcontinent, the Netherlands and Moroccan Islam, without forgetting the arrival of the large migratory waves of 2015 linked to the civil war in Syria.
There is not necessarily a convergence between the two anti-Semitisms, that of an Arab-Muslim immigration, mainly Maghrebi in the case of France, and the "long-standing French" anti-Semitism, rooted in the tradition of the most conservative Catholic Church, in that of the nationalist right and in certain left-wing circles that we find today even on the benches of the National Assembly. The only common point is the convergence of their rancor on the same object of repulsion. Beyond that, we are dealing with three distinct traditions of anti-Judaism, one of which is today in full expansion, it is anti-Semitism of Maghrebi origin, Islamic or not. Christian and nationalist anti-Semitism has regressed without disappearing, far from it. Finally, the disapproval of Israel which constitutes the basis and the doxa of a part of the left can feed within it a drift towards an anti-Judaism with an anti-capitalist base, as in the 19th century, and anti-imperialist, since the State of Israel would only be the latest avatar of the fantasy of "world Jewish power".
After 1945, the rejection or hatred of "the Jew" could no longer be expressed as before the Second World War. Hence the interest in examining the evolution of anti-Zionism, which is generally ignored as having its roots in the Catholic and nationalist extreme right from the end of the XNUMXth century. And whose central place in the Nazi credo, obsessed with the idea of preventing at all costs the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, has also been forgotten.
Let us clarify, in order to avoid wasting time, that anti-Zionism is not the same as criticism of Israeli policy, which is obviously perfectly acceptable. Anti-Zionism after 1948 is the questioning of the legitimacy of this State, that is to say, of its right to exist. In other words, the establishment of what Pierre-André Taguieff calls a "demolition permit". We are therefore far here from the criticism of a government policy. More than fifty years ago, and in a luminous way, Léon Poliakoff in 1969 and Vladimir Jankelevich in 1971 had shown how the old anti-Jewish passion, now masked by the shame of Auschwitz, could give free rein in anti-Zionism which had become the acceptable cover for this collective paranoia. From the "surplus people" before the Second World War, we had shifted to the "surplus State", the instigator of war, just as "the Jew" before the war had been stigmatized by Céline as the harbinger of a new generalized butchery. Céline's anti-Jewish logorrhea, at least in the first of his three pamphlets (Trivia for a massacre published in 1937), essentially revolved around the fixed idea that "the Jews" intended to lead "the Goyim" (sic) towards a new slaughterhouse.
LC: Muslims pride themselves on having always been much more respectful towards Jewish minorities than Europe: what should we think of this tolerance towards Jews claimed by historical Islam?
GB: The idea of a natural "tolerance" of Islam and its equally natural propensity for conviviality is a historical illusion, a consoling myth created by a certain number of European historians of the 1791th century. The notion of "convivencia" was introduced by Spanish historians who disagreed on the definition of the identity of their country, just as they disagreed on the vision of Islam. And as for the Jews of the Arab-Muslim world, a myth forged by Ashkenazi Jews who tended to instrumentalize their history for their own ends. For them, it was a question of highlighting a mythical tolerance of Islam towards Jews and Christians, to the point of outlining a society of conviviality (the legend of Al-Andalus) in order to better highlight the archaism of Christian Europe with regard to the emancipation of its Jewish minorities. In the middle of the 1917th century, in fact, only a minority of Jews in the world were emancipated in the sense of the French measures of XNUMX… The complete emancipation of the Jews of Germany, a very large community or the Jews of the United Kingdom were not completed until the second half of the XNUMXth century. Not to mention the immense mass of Judaism in the Russian Empire (more than half of the Jews in the world) who would only be emancipated by the revolutionary upheaval of XNUMX.
This myth of conviviality gave rise to the legend of a paradise of tolerance, the Al Andalus of the 1598th to the XNUMXth century, in the Andalusian style. However, the use of the word tolerance here is profoundly ahistorical and anachronistic. Tolerance, in fact, is the result of a long intellectual process that took place in the West during the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries. To arrive in France at the Edict of Nantes (XNUMX), it was necessary to go through forty years of religious war marked by an unleashing of barbarity, to finally develop the notion of compromise. Namely, that one can live alongside people who do not think like you, but who, nonetheless, have the right to live. Trials Montaigne's works, composed in the middle of the period of the "wars of religion", are marked by these notions of relativism, doubt, compromise and ultimately of tolerance. They are its most direct legacy. The same is true on the scale of Europe in the first half of the 17th century, torn apart by the Thirty Years' War. In some respects, if the 17th century appears to be the great century of thought (cf. the work of Paul Hazard [1]), it is also because of this climate of violence from which emerges the notion of the subject against the clan or the tribe. The identity constructed against the identity received and suffered. The establishment of a process of emancipation with regard to tribal affiliations and collective beliefs.
Therefore, attributing this notion of tolerance to Islam is absurd, it is only possible by marrying demagogy (flattering the dominant "religion of the oppressed" "in the neighborhoods" as they say) and the ocean of ignorance that surrounds us. It is not only an anachronism, it is also nonsense since Islam, which is first and foremost a legal code and an orthopraxy, only accepts the existence of others on their own terms. Never as equals. Otherness is consubstantially foreign to it. Hence the notion of dhimma ("protection" in Arabic) is central to Islam. Some thurifers of Islam tend today to consider this notion as an obsolete archaism, on the pretext, among other things, that this code of inferiority of the Christian and the Jew in the land of Islam was in fact abolished by the Ottoman Empire in the middle of the 19th century. As if the law dictated morals.
This "protection" of the non-Muslim Jew and Christian remains, however, until today, a capital notion in the psychic economy of Islam. It does not come from tolerance, but from submission since it is not a contract between equals. This is why the expression "pact of Omar" [2] about it is inappropriate. This is a non-negotiated rule that is compulsory to the submissive. It is a leonine "contract" dictated to the one who has no say in the matter and which allows him to live and practice his faith (as discreetly as possible), on the condition of subscribing to a large number of clauses. And of paying two additional taxes. The ideas of equality and tolerance between Muslims and non-Muslims are absent from a mental universe structured by the notion of submission, absent from a psychic economy in which the word of God, uncreated, not interpreted, but applied.
Pass the dhimma for proof of tolerance in the Western sense of the term when it comes to a life exposed to contempt, humiliation and potentially violence constitutes a historical forfeiture when we know the reality. Certainly, its methods of application differ according to times and places, but the text itself remains intact and can at any time be put back into force in its most severe version. When the fate of Jews or Christians improves, it is most often according to the goodwill of those in power, and very rarely to a change in the law. This is the definition of arbitrariness, and this is what explains why the memories of Christian or Jewish minorities in Arab-Muslim lands are marked by the omnipresence of a climate of fear which sometimes degenerates into fear, even into anxiety.
To speak of the tolerance of Islam is to make tolerance a natural disposition or a moral question and not the result of an intellectual process, the culmination of a revolution in thought and work on oneself. Acceptance of others is the least natural thing in the world. However, the West of the 17th century achieved this masterful revolution of which we remain the heirs. Islam has never known this revolution. The rare attempts at renovation or "rebirth" (I am thinking of the Nahda from the beginning of the 20th century) were crushed or ended in deadlock like the majority of Arab upheavals of the 20th and 21st centuries.
If we have in mind the intellectual revolution of the subject, inseparable from the democratic revolution that characterizes Western thought of the 17th–19th centuries, we must conclude that the majority of the Arab-Muslim space has remained very distant from it. Hence, a large-scale cultural conflict when a part of these populations reach a West whose intellectual parameters are foreign to them. From the West, many will embrace the way of life, in particular (for those who can) the frenzy of hyper-consumption. However, many will remain foreign to its way of being. Hence the notion-slogan of "living together" resembles a Potemkin village, a hollow dream that masks the opposite of what it advocates: where "orthodox" and literalist Islam triumphs in Europe, there is no longer any possibility of a true living together, that is to say in equality of status.
LC: What is the source of this Muslim anti-Semitism? Is it circumstantial (we easily mention the State of Israel), or is it included in the Koranic condemnation or relegation of the “Others” (Christians, women, etc.)? Or, as some historians suggest, would you say ontological, Islam being steeped in a historical mimicry expressed in a fascination/repulsion for Judaism?
GB: These questions overlap. However, it should be noted that it is better to speak of Muslim anti-Judaism than anti-Semitism in order to avoid borrowing a notion invented by the European 19th century and which, as you know, evokes a mythical Semitic race. In the Arab-Muslim domain, at that time, we are far from these considerations. We remain then in a rejection of a religious nature.
Is this a rejection of a circumstantial nature or a more structural, metaphysical one? You rightly use the term ontological… That the historical conjuncture played a role in the rejection of the Arab-Muslim world is obvious, with two key factors. The first, the best known, is the emergence of the nation-state of Israel on a land considered by the Muslim world as Muslim from all eternity, inventing late a sacredness of Jerusalem that does not appear in the Koran (the city is never mentioned there). It is the Dome of the Rock that is mentioned there (what is improperly called the Al Aqsa mosque) and not the city itself, Yerushalayim from its Hebrew name. It must be recalled for a better cultural understanding of the ongoing conflict that the said Al Aqsa mosque, the Dome of the Rock, is built exactly on the site of the Jewish Temple destroyed by the Romans at the beginning of our era. That the construction of the "third holiest place of Islam" was thought out, designed and carried out on the site of the holiest place in Judaism is an almost perfect illustration of mimicry [3] and the strategy of erasing the origin.
If the conflict over this land appeared from the 1910s as a conflict of a national nature over the same disputed land, it took on a religious turn from the 1925s when, under the leadership of the Supreme Muslim Council of Palestine and its president (incidentally "Grand Mufti of Jerusalem", the title he gave himself), the young Amin al Husseini, barely thirty years old, the mobilization against the "Zionists" was to be developed on a Muslim basis (85 to 88% of Palestinian Arabs are Sunni Muslims) rather than on a national basis. nation remains largely foreign to a society that is massively Muslim, illiterate and clan-based. Only the Arab elites, who are generally Christian at the time, appropriate this term. This is why modern nationalism has difficulty taking root there. Islam, on the other hand, opens the way to channel energies and emotions. The intelligence of the "grand mufti" is to have been able to Islamize the conflict by focusing it on the "sacred" character of Jerusalem called Al Quds.
From the 1930s onwards, the religious dimension prevailed over all others. Moreover, the Arab camp spoke less and less often of the "Zionists" (or later of the "Israelis"), preferring, until today, the term "Jews" (Yahoud). It is also significant that the first episode of armed resistance to Jewish nationalism in Palestine was led in 1935 by a Muslim preacher of Syrian origin, a scholar of Koranic matters, Ezzedine Al Qassam, who, for years, had gathered in the suburbs of Haifa, on a base strictly islamic, the poor, the dispossessed, landless peasants and the unemployed, a whole small people who will form the first nucleus of this armed resistance. It is not from the nationalist bourgeoisie that this first combat group emerges, but from the re-Islamized popular circles.
There is a second aspect to the rejection of Jews in the Arab-Muslim world, which is their gradual emancipation, under the leadership of Europe, through colonization and even more so through education via the vast networks of schools of European origin, whether consular schools or Christian schools. But first and foremost, it is the network of schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle [4] (founded in Paris in 1860), which spread throughout almost the entire Arab world (with the exception of Yemen).
This cultural, intellectual and psychological emancipation is not necessarily correlated with the modification of the law when the Ottoman Empire, in two stages (1839 then 1856) abolished the notion of the issue and proclaims the legal equality of all its subjects. But there is a long way between the law and morals. However, this liberalization, carried out step by step, results after three generations in a difficult, contested, but very real exit from the status of dominated, submissive, protected (the issue). Islam experiences this liberation of the the issue, in this case here of the the issue Jewish, as an insult and an offense. This is what he calls "arrogant" conduct, as if real equality between Muslims and non-Muslims remained impossible to envisage. This is the nodal point of a psychic economy closed in on itself, incapable of envisaging otherness on an equal footing, and which immediately dismisses the question to keep only la response. Hence the significant cultural blockages that remain to this day. Hence, also, in mirror image, the dramatic incapacity of many Westerners to hear the cultural roots of a conflict, to consider the anthropological dimension of all clashes between human groups, schematically reduced to their sole economic and social dimension (cf. Hugues Lagrange, The Denial of Cultures, 2010, about the riots in the French suburbs that occurred in the fall of 2005).
The process of Jewish emancipation through Western modernity runs from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century. It fuels the structural rejection of Jews by Islam, a rejection that is exacerbated by the Jews' claim to build a nation-state on a part of Palestine (the "Holy Land").
This does not, however, invalidate the hypothesis of an anti-Judaism of an ontological nature, marked by ambivalence and which swings between fascination and repulsion towards a Judaism from which Islam is directly descended. Which is precisely like its matrix. When Islam claims to implement the original message "betrayed by the Jews" who were its bearers, it condemns itself to maintaining towards Judaism an attitude oscillating between recognition and condemnation. Recognition: these are the verses of the Koran which affirm the historical right of the Jews to the "Holy Land". In this regard, one must read the words of a certain number of notable Muslims in Palestine at the end of the 1899th century, starting with the former mayor of Jerusalem, Youssouf Zia al Khalidi in a letter addressed to Herzl in XNUMX. But this is a recognition disturbed by resentment against a Judaism stubbornly determined to persevere in its being. To the Muslim's ear, this stubbornness sounds like a challenge to the Koranic message that closes the history of redemption. Because the message of Mohammed is addressed to all of humanity called to become Muslim. Universalism, hence the proselytism specific to Islam, as to Christianity, runs up against the Jewish matrix, a witness mound whose perseverance weakens the new message.
Shock is followed by anger, even hatred, and a rage for destruction as the only way out. the anxiety of origin as Daniel Sibony would say. To be absolute, these messages need to erase the origin that undermines them in their claim to be the whole. The question of origin is the crucial question that carries within it the myriad of dramas to come. This is true for Islam, and it is even more so for Christianity founded almost directly on the word of the rav yeshua, that is, Jesus. By publishing in 1863 his Life of Jesus, to the great scandal of the Church of France which would make him pay for it, Renan highlighted the almost exclusively Jewish matrix of the Christian message. From there, the origin of the curse ultimately genocidal which Jules Isaac, less than a century later, would undertake the study (Jesus and Israel [5]).
Commonplaces: This Islamic fixation on Jewishness is found politically: we thus hear, in a recurring manner, Islamists comparing the situation of Muslims in France to the persecution of Jews under the Occupation. The assertion is absolutely obscene, but, if the West is indeed inhabited by a "genocidal passion", to borrow the title of your 2006 work (Europe, a genocidal passion), aren't Muslims ultimately right to fear for themselves?
Georges Bensoussan: In this book that you cite, I had tried, without claiming to be exhaustive of course, to identify some cultural roots of the Shoah that, in line with the thought of a Pierre Legendre who has just passed away, I consider to be an anthropological caesura. By evoking a "genocidal passion", I tried to identify its foundations, its outlines, the path of this desire to make the Jewish sign disappear from the cultural horizon of the Christian West. By chance of reading, I recently came across the episode of the meeting between Theodor Herzl and the pope in January 1904, a few months before the death of the Zionist leader. He had come to Rome to plead the cause of a Jewish national home in the "Holy Land" as the Christians say. The pope received him very courteously and, to his request, he simply replied: "You do not recognize the divinity of Jesus, so we cannot recognize you, you Jews". In other words, the Jews will never have rights in the Holy Land since they do not recognize the messiahship of Jesus. This question constitutes the crux of the problem and leads to a construction which aims, as we all know, and this is not original, to replace Judaism. This "theology of substitution" aims less to make the Jewish message disappear than the Jewish messenger, while the Christianity of the origins is nothing other than a Jewish branch among many others. It is also interesting to note that in classical historiography the gospels were written in Hebrew and Aramaic at the end of the 1st century, long after the death of Jesus. The more recent work of Claude Tresmontant [6] convincingly demonstrate that the gospels were written in the immediate aftermath of Christ's death (perhaps in Hebrew or Greek by Hebrew speakers), and by his disciples, which is more likely. It is difficult to understand why 70 years would have passed between the death of the supposed Messiah and the account by his disciples. A priori, this delay seems improbable unless one takes into account the desire of institutionalized Christianity to break its roots with Judaism.
This somewhat lengthy development is to explain that I used the expression "genocidal passion" only in the case of the Jewish people who were wanted to be eradicated from the surface of the Earth. Because this is indeed a crime ontological that is not supported by any economic, political or territorial rationality. A crime of a strictly ideological nature when it is necessary to make the Jews disappear for existential reasons: "They are cursed if we are Christians" noted a French priest at the end of the 19th century, a statement reported by the newspaper La Croix.
This is why it is not a question of extrapolating and conceiving of an inhabited Europe as by essence of a genocidal will towards any enemy. As if it were a "racial" type identity. Europe is crossed by multiple conflicts, in particular in the modern era from the "wars of religion" between the middle of the 16th and the middle of the 17th century, conflicts of an atrocity now forgotten, but which are not of a genocidal nature. Horrible massacres (one thinks of the French wars of religion and the work of Agrippa d'Aubigné, The Tragics,) an orgy of sadism (one thinks of the wars in the Vendée in 1793), but not the desire to make a population disappear until the last.
This is why I reject the application of the words "genocidal passion" to today's Muslims. Just as I also refuse to believe that today's Muslims would fear for their survival in Europe. If that were the case, it would be difficult to understand why so many of them want to reach the Old Continent when they would be threatened with certain death there. This would be ignorant or stupid behavior. The same goes for France, this State described as an "ontologically racist State" in the circles of the "decolonial" far left flanked by its many proto-Islamist allies. But then, once again, why do so many Muslims, from the Maghreb in particular, covet this famous permit to enter a country where discrimination, segregation, racism await them on a daily basis and, in fine, danger of death…? Enough to revive this chromo of angelic populations, nourished by a “religion of peace and love” and heading, innocent face and beating heart, towards their executioners… As a reminder: in 1938, while the clouds were gathering, the Jews were constantly fleeing Europe. It was the race for visas and passports, the recourse to illegal immigration and almost everywhere the doors were closed. Until the hypocritical abandonment of the Evian conference (July 1938) crowned by the White Paper British Palestine Treaty promulgated which in May 1939 closed the gates of the Holy Land to the Jews.
We are witnessing the opposite movement with the Muslims who are arriving in Europe. This is why this massive denial of reality questions the capacity of the human psyche to disguise reality in order to camp in a universe of pretense, illusions, and lures that ensure short-term survival. It also questions the so-called "genocidal passion" of Europe applied to Muslims to find there the old Arab-Muslim mimicry towards the Jews. It is the imaginary of the Arab Orient that it questions much more than that of Europe. An Arab imaginary (in particular in the Maghreb where in 1945 the most numerous Jewish communities of the Muslim Orient were concentrated, Iran and Turkey included), inhabited by the double movement of repulsion/fascination with regard to the Jewish sign. A common ambivalence that is also found in certain forms of anti-Judaism in Europe. From there, a mimetic behavior towards the Jews, even a jealous behavior in the original sense of the term when it comes to replacing the Jews to appear as the only figure of origin.
The origin of Islam remains deeply marked by the Jewish message, and in some respects it is often a carbon copy of Judaism. The prophet Mohammed, who despite the legend is not illiterate, but on the contrary knows perfectly the great texts of the Jewish tradition, builds with his own people a teaching imbued with Judaism. This is where the problem lies. As in the case of Christianity, the message is kept by getting rid of the messenger. For Christians, the theory of substitution; for Muslims, the theory of falsification. a fortiori when Islam poses as a revealed religion that closes. And when we claim to be our own origin.
We cannot dissociate the intellectual and moral crises we are experiencing today from the anthropological revolution that began at least a century ago, namely the collapse of religious practice, particularly in France of Catholic practice. In 1872, in the last public census that officially included a religious section, more than 97% of French people answered that they were "Roman Catholics". Give or take a few points, we are still practically there at the beginning of the 1960s. But in 2020, only 25% of them give the same answer. This is the major and largely underestimated shock.
Finally, and without falling into a mystical approach, we can ask ourselves what, beyond the jealousy of origin, is so unbearable to moderns in the Jewish message. Already in 1882, in his brochure Self-emancipation, Leon Pinsker called the Jews "the chosen people of universal hatred." I am not far from thinking, even if it is with reluctance, that it is possible that the law which limits, orders and ensures the passage from barbarism to civilization constitutes perhaps the heart of the unbearable for a world won over by thehubris of omnipotence, in contempt of the most elementary morality. The law that prevents is the basic message of all civilization and to be constantly brought back to it becomes unbearable. We hear here, in echo, the words that one of the sages of ancient Judaism, Hillel, is said to have answered to this Roman emperor who challenged him to be able to summarize the teaching of Judaism by standing on one foot: "Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you."
LC: This would certainly merit discussion, or even a new interview... But, in parallel with this atavistic anti-Judaism, do we not find, deep down, an identification of Muslims immigrating to Europe with the progressive settlement of Jews in Palestine, the history of which you excellently trace in your recent book, The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (1870-1950) [7] ?
GB: The arrival of Muslims in Europe, a massive phenomenon that is already half a century old, has made Islam the second religion in many host countries. Religious phenomena escape us, starting with the Islamist groundswell, because we have emerged, noted Marcel Gauchet in the aftermath of the attacks of November 13, 2015, "from this fundamental religiosity." The spread of the Western model, what he calls the "cultural Westernization of the globe," imposes, according to him, on all societies a break with the religious organization of the world. When modernity is experienced as a "cultural aggression," a fortiori in traditional Muslim societies shaken up, even disrupted by emigration, this context, explains Marcel Gauchet, can cause "a virulent reactivation of a religious fund in the process of disintegrating." If Islam is the matrix of Islamist violence, it is because it "is the last to come of the monotheisms and thinks of itself as the closure of the monotheistic invention. It reflects the religions that preceded it and claims to put an end to what was the path of this revelation," explains Marcel Gauchet. From there, its aggressiveness towards the two other monotheisms, a violence fueled by resentment and incomprehension, by the vision of the gulf opened between the victorious discourse of Islam and a geopolitical reality marked by innumerable failures.
Comparing this immigration of settlement to the Jewish immigration to Palestine between 1880 and 1947 seems to me to be a sophism. Quite simply because the Jews who landed in Palestine had, rightly or wrongly (that is another question) the conviction of come back homeThey have not inhabited this land for centuries, but it remains at the center of their liturgy, their prayers, their ceremonies, their imagination.
That said, and with the exception of Spain, in what way do Muslims who arrive in Europe today feel they are returning? at their home ? Unless we mention the end of Islam in Poitiers in 732 and, why not, the Roncevaux Pass and the fate of Roland…? However, what does Muslim Spain represent in a Muslim imagination structured around Mecca and Medina, these two cities which indicate the direction of prayer (Quibla). Jerusalem is also an artifice here that is only brought to light at times when the city escapes the Muslims: in the 1917th century with the Crusades, in the 1947th century with English colonization (XNUMX-XNUMX) and especially with the Zionist movement. However, Jerusalem is not never mentioned in the Quran (the Dome of the Rock is mentioned, but not the city itself), Yerushalayim, the Hebrew name Jerusalem is mentioned more than 600 times in the Jewish Bible (Ta Na Kh). So we find here, in other words, the logic of substitution and the same mimetic passion for these Jews that we wish to erase in order to better don their elder's garb.
Can Jewish immigration to Palestine be described as colonialist immigration? What happened on the ground between 1890 and 1940? Jewish immigration that grew in scale after 1930 and, far from wanting to dominate the Arabs, ignored them. This policy can be considered reprehensible, but at the same time it cannot be considered a colonial enterprise like the one that prevailed in Algeria at the time. There, the French colonizer dominated the local Arab-Berber population, expropriated it, made it work and exploited it. If there was none of this in Palestine, it was because it was a colonial enterprise. colonization and not a colonialist enterprise.
A colonization enterprise in the sense that the cities of ancient Greece founded Marseille around 600 BCE or colonized southern Italy at the same time. The atypical form of Jewish nationalism is a form of colonization when a dispersed people, who have long ceased to inhabit the land of their ancestors, claim to return there to form a nation-state. This scenario is obviously too singular not to destabilize understanding. It blurs the usual points of reference and feeds the temptation to attach this unknown figure to the classic schema of history. However, here, precisely, something resists these references and these models, starting with the fact, still difficult to hear today, that Judaism is first and foremost a practice before being a system of beliefs. And that it is secondly a people (in the original sense of nation) structured around a book and a language. It is no coincidence that the Zionist movement made written and spoken Hebrew a priority fight, from literary and journalistic Hebrew in the middle of the 1890th century, to Hebrew as the language of instruction (around 50) and then as the mother tongue before the Great War when half of the Jewish population of Palestine (60 to 000 inhabitants) spoke Hebrew in their daily lives.
LC: Your heterodox positions have earned you an improbable trial for “racial hatred” [8] , brought, in particular, by the Islamists of the CCIF [now CCIE]. You finally won it, but at the end of a test that evokes Kafka, Ubu and Orwell, and which you put into perspective in your book A French Exile [9] which analyzes its ins and outs. What does this reveal, in your eyes, about the state of contemporary France and more generally of the West, about the major trends that are affecting them?
GB: You are right to mention Kafka and Orwell. At the end of this judicial ordeal spread over four years until the cassation, and at the end as you recall of three victories (first instance, appeal and cassation), most of those around me had, rightly, expressed their joy at having, as they say, "won".
I was certainly satisfied, but I never felt any real joy because, for me, the damage was done: this trial should never have taken place. That was the essential thing, what we had sometimes lost sight of along the way. The holding of this trial was proof of the regression of debate and the degradation of intellectual life in France. To understand this, we must return to Tocqueville and his analysis of the "absence of thought" in the United States, and to Orwell who clearly perceives the totalitarian matrix of mass societies obsessed with the control of individuals, a fortiori where communism served as a transition to modernity, in Russia and especially in China, which announces to us the reign of almost total social control over our lives.
Let us return to the trial initiated by the Islamists of the CCIF [now CCIE] by means of a report that the public prosecutor followed up. So the State, via the Ministry of Justice. This trial for a crime of opinion was the harbinger, with others, of a regression of freedom of speech, and gradually, of freedom of thought. Entire areas of reality are thus removed from debate, forbidden from being mentioned by the strange triad formed by leftism, hyper financial liberalism, and Islamism. Among these areas, immigration, cultural anthropology assimilated to an insidious form of "racism" when it makes the banal observation of the variety of social organizations and world views. Evoking this diversity seems to contravene the utopia of the universal and interchangeable man.
In my case, and this is what earned me this trial, it seemed difficult to accept that the societies of the Maghreb were bearers of an anti-Jewish culture that was sometimes very deep, in the same way that it seemed impossible to admit that these clan societies (cf. Germaine Tillon, The Harem and the Cousins, 1957) secreted a violence of which all are paying the price. Starting with women, children, blacks and Jews.
Evoking different cultural software, different social behaviors (cf. Hugues Lagrange, The Denial of Cultures, 2010) can lead to you being targeted by the destructive accusation of "racism". Regarding the 2005 riots, Lagrange had done it. He had been torn to pieces by his political family of origin. It is as if describing the reality of the archaic violence that structures part of the "world below" was making it exist. Added to this climate of intimidation that can quickly turn into intellectual terrorism is the ready-made thinking that sees in every difference an injustice and in every singularity an "attack on the dignity of others". This democratic drift has transformed the passion for equality into an aspiration for egalitarian leveling that sometimes ends up seeing in the singular talent of an individual an attack on the dignity of those who are deprived of it.
It is as if the recognition of the singularity of individuals, and of the unequal distribution between them of capacities, talents, skills and even moral value, was an attack on equality as a religion. I am not straying from the subject by evoking this passion for egalitarianism which places on the same level Searching for lost time and a comic book album. It is part of a process of massification that aims to erase the individual and has a close relationship with the regression of freedom of thought.
Since we are not all artists or heroes, we cannot continue to ignore the key role of the individual, a lack of awareness which is linked to the singularity of cultures and this banal observation that some are more stimulating than others which promote resignation and fatalism.
The trial that was brought against me showed the impossibility of talking about immigration, in particular Maghrebi immigration and the regressive cultural patterns (anti-Semitism is just one example) that it had imported into France. We have not finished paying for this silence when, in order to prevent the risk of racism ("not playing into the hands of the extreme right"), anti-racism gone astray casts a veil over entire sections of a social reality that we refuse to think about.
This "anti-racism" has become in the long run one of the worst vectors of mass conformism. In order "not to stigmatize people who are already stigmatized" (sic), social reality is distorted, the historical past is tampered with, and victims are subjected to violence a second time. In the question of the slave trade, for example, efforts will be made to silence or minimize the Arab and Muslim slave trade in order to better instruct the trial of Europe, this absolute source of human misfortune. In the name of "living together" in today's France, anti-Judaism in the Maghreb will be silenced. In doing so, the uprooting inflicted on 500 Jews from North Africa in the 000th century will be ignored.
But this misguided antiracism is also a weapon of class. The blackmail of the extreme right has silenced painting real of the social reality of France. We will therefore keep quiet about the fate of young girls, single or divorced women in the cities, we will keep quiet about the identity of the perpetrators of gang rapes in the cities (" rotating "), we will keep an embarrassed silence at the mention of anti-black and anti-Asian racism, of anti-Semitism "which is like the air we breathe" as the French sociologist of Algerian origin Smaïn Laacher said in 2015, in a rare burst of courage. Finally, we will keep quiet in a cowardly silence about the departure (the flight?) of 90% of the Jews of Seine Saint-Denis in less than twenty years. And we will feel, like Léon Blum once did at the signing of the Munich agreements, a "cowardly relief".
In the name of this misguided antiracism, we cover up with silence frightening situations of quasi-mafia violence, for the sake of anti-racism, we cast a veil over the archaism of these societies with their clannish functioning, as well as over the crushing of the weakest and the domination of women while, past the ring road, carried by the distinction between "correct neighborhoods", we will endlessly discuss our "democratic values".
This trial highlighted the impossibility of these denunciations. Hence, the ban on debate. The immigrant being by definition a victims, and since every victim is essentially the incarnation of virtue, one could use these nonsense to cover up the suffering of the "world below" with silence.
At the same time, one could not blame a part of mass immigration for several elements responsible for the political and cultural regression of our Western societies. Islamism today is only one aspect of it. By capillarity, fear has won over minds and condemned them to silence. Cowardice has done the rest. Rereading Spinoza and Diderot today, one remains overwhelmed by the backward march of which we are contemporaries.
This trial made me better understand what Christophe Guilluy had analyzed well, this parody of antiracism as a weapon of social and moral relegation in the hands of the better off. And in the name of the virtue of which, by nature, they are the custodians. The accusation of racism (variants: "fascism", "extreme right", etc.) silences all dissenting speech. This is its primary function. Like the antifascism of the 1950s and after. Starting with the speech of the working classes who intend to persist in their being and their culture. And who see in the immigration from which they live, they, the daily effects (how many state councilors who have rejected so many bills restricting this mass immigration live in La Courneuve or Stains?), a threat existential on their collective being, their identity, in other words on what remains for them when they have already been dispossessed of all control over their destiny. Crushed economically, socially and culturally, they still have their lifestyles, their cultural references, in short, quite simply their France. But then, the attachment to their identity risks being disguised as racism, synonymous with the exclusion of others. Thus draped in the posture of good, and entirely imbued with noble sentiments, the "anti-racist" participates in the generalized discrediting of working-class circles.
A little over a century ago, the working classes, these "working classes" assimilated to "dangerous classes" (see the eponymous study by Louis Chevalier published in 1958), were already struck by immorality. At the time, it was alcoholism and prostitution, L'Assommoir à girl. Today, immorality is still in vogue, but its face has changed. We no longer consume the week's pay at the local bar while celebrating Saint Monday, we remain slumped on the sofa in front of the television, feeding "bad thoughts", making xenophobic and racist remarks before voting "shamefully" for the return of the "darkest hours of our history".
A century and a half of French history. In terms of contempt, we have not progressed an inch. It is always displayed under the guise of good and concern for "openness to the Other". It is expressed on the occasion of each social crisis, from the "Yellow Vests" of 2018 to the outcry against pension reform in early 2023. Today's working classes, massively made up of the small workers in the tertiary sector and what remains of the working class, represent one of the worst fears of the oligarchy in power.
LC: Finally, in what terms would you formulate the generalized crisis, particularly of identity or culture, which we have entered?
GB: I come back to this trial since it is at the heart of your question: it can be seen as a private fact that only interests me and my loved ones. And that is partly the case. It can also be seen as a social fact in the same way as the so-called "miscellaneous facts". This is what explains why this trial mobilized so much. I remember that when the trial opened, on January 25, 2017, the room was full. A large part of the public had to stay outside.
Why? Because through this affair, in itself trivial, everyone perceived more or less confusedly that freedom of expression was threatened (and is indeed threatened) and without the slightest need for state censorship. Self-censorship and the media blackout govern the "public debate". Address the questions that inhabit, or even distress, the population and your remarks risk being described as skidThis word, by itself, because it indicates the right path, marks the first circle of social hell.
In this media comforter, there is no need to censor, cut or ban this or that publication, the authors generally take care of it by practicing self-censorship as soon as they want to be published. Secondly, come the publishers [10]. Thirdly, finally, there are some booksellers who confuse their profession with a propaganda office of the agit-prop of yesteryear and systematically boycott certain publishers. Whatever the subject matter. Thus, the Toucan/L'Artilleur editions have been the subject of a silent and underhand boycott for several years by certain booksellers who claim to be "committed to the left". These professors of virtue rehabilitate the terrorist climate of the Chinese cultural revolution of yesteryear, a French version still modest in the image of its cheap fighters, a "Chinese experience" so highly praised in the past by a stream of intellectuals who never made amends for having supported this enterprise of humiliation and murder. When we rightly ask every fascist histrion to atone for his commitment to the Collaboration, why do we not make the same demands of the advocates of a communism that they once covered with their prestige as artists, writers or filmmakers?
This case was a revelation of the identity and cultural crisis. Identity crisis highlighted in 2018 by the "Yellow Vests", which showed how financial globalization was radically changing societies, anonymizing them and standardizing them by transforming the citizen of yesteryear [11] as a consumer-viewer, passive and mute before the spectacle of the destruction of his cultural references and his identity anchors, which will quickly risk being qualified as “reactionary rooting” and a threat to “democracy”.
Seeing one's way of life destroyed and at the same time being forbidden to say so is one of the worst sufferings. It generates a resentment that incubates violence. The same goes for the spectacle that is unfolding before our eyes of a long unraveling of the West of the Enlightenment, by consumerism, the entertainment industry, the devaluation of work, the political, cultural and societal archaism of a part of mass immigration, the decline of secularism, the regression of the fate of girls, the savagery of certain neighborhoods, etc. And at the same time being forbidden to analyze this gigantic mutation...
It was a long undertaking to get rid of the tyranny of the Catholic Church in France. But today, everything seems to be starting again, but worse, because Islam is a culture and a political project. universal called to rule all of humanity. Other, more calm voices are nevertheless trying to make themselves heard within the Muslim world; but it must be noted, writes the Israeli historian Meir Bar Asher in Jews in the Quran recently published [12], today, they are far from being dominant and find little echo. The order that it promises us is radically antinomic to the spirit of the Enlightenment, whatever the criticisms that for two centuries they have not failed to generate. The fact remains that they constitute since Spinoza, Kant and Rousseau the base which makes, also, the civilization that we intend to defend. We are the heirs of Diderot's Snow of Rameau and Bougainville voyage supplementThe bigotry, archaism, stupidity and violence specific to Islamism which has invaded our streets would not support, today, the public reading of a single page of Diderot.
Today, sneaky Islamization is combined with cowardice. A large number of books published fifty years ago could no longer be published today. And just as many films and plays. In terms of freedom of expression, the regression is impressive, and in many cases it has as its common foundation the terror inspired by Islam.
In my memory, this trial is linked to the episode of the "Yellow Vests", this truly new democratic expression in this numb and frightened country. The identity and cultural surge that the "Yellow Vests" claimed (beyond social demands, starting with the price of fuel), far from being reactionary, intended on the contrary to reconnect with a more authentic life, a recovered freedom of the mind, the break with mass solitude, the desire to recreate social ties, the collective by questioning the meaning of our scattered and fragmented existences. Bewildered because stunned by the artificial joy of permanent consumption and ordered to be "happy".
Looking at the political path followed by our societies since the 1970s, we are impressed by a democratic regression that goes far beyond the left-right divide. We are also surprised by the fact that this reality had been analyzed more than sixty years ago, sometimes as when Herbert Marcuse published One-Dimensional Man.
The collective emotion that governs us, the seduction brought about by violence and its aesthetic trappings, show how much the reading of Wilhelm Reich has gone out of fashion (cf. Mass psychology of fascism). So we are stuck in obsolete mental patterns when we imagine reliving the Spanish Civil War when it is on another terrain that our future is being played out. The one described by Aldous Huxley in the 1930s (cf. The best of worlds) which announced the primacy of the biological over the political as Nazism had begun to implement it, and that of George Orwell (1984) who drew a picture for freedom of thought that is already almost the present in communist China. And tomorrow, where?
