FRANCE AND THE JEWS: FROM THE REVOLUTION TO CHIRAC

Jews, Arabs, and French Diplomacy: A Special Report (Commentary)
David Pryce-Jones
The official position taken toward French Jews goes back to the revolution of 1789. In December of that year, during a debate over granting citizenship to the country’s Jewish minority, Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, a liberal aristocrat, declared in the Constituent Assembly: “Everything must be refused to the Jews as a nation, and everything granted to the Jews as individuals.” This idea was soon enshrined in law. Behind it lay the suspicion that Jews had their own brand of nationalism, one that cut across the French nationalism emerging from the revolution. To the French elite, moreover, Jews have consistently seemed to be the conspiratorial tools of others, first of Germany and Russia, then of Britain, and finally, in the 20th century, of Zionists.

What is remarkable is that, in spite of the unregenerate anti-Semitism revealed and unleashed by the Dreyfus Affair at the end of the 19th century, in spite even of French participation in the Nazi mass murder of World War II, French Jews have generally accommodated themselves to the state’s view of the necessary relation between them, and have been content, at least until recently, to downplay the ethnic element in their own identity as a people....

In April 1996, in a speech in Cairo, Chirac claimed that France intended to follow its traditional policies in the Middle East with renewed vigor. Visiting Jerusalem that October, and walking through the Old City, he accused Israeli security guards of closing in on him, pushing them away angrily with a gesture as symbolic as it was physical. At his next stop, in Ramallah, he declared that Arafat’s Palestinian democracy might serve as an example to all Arab states. Moving on to Amman in Jordan, he denounced the Western sanctions on Saddam Hussein, with whom he had maintained a friendly relationship dating back to the mid-1970’s. He advised Arafat not to sign at Camp David in 2000.