“Jews will leave in large numbers, and France will fall into the hands of either sharia law or the Front National.”
Those words were spoken in December 2014 by Roger Cukierman, at that time the head of the French Jewish representative organization CRIF, at a rally opposing antisemitism in the Paris suburb of Creteil. With France presently convulsed by rioting against the background of a looming presidential election that will pit the Islamist-aligned, extreme left against the far right, Cukierman’s warning may turn out to have been alarmingly prescient.
Ostensibly directed against the poor conditions in French schools, the riots inflicted more than $1 billion of damage, alongside some 2,300 arrests and nearly 1,000 police officers hospitalized with injuries.
While it is an oversimplification to argue that immigration is the sole cause of the unrest, the worst episodes took place in big urban areas like Paris and Marseille, as well as in provincial cities, where immigrants and their descendants tend to concentrate. This aspect, along with the brandishing of Moroccan, Algerian and especially Palestinian flags, has resulted in feverish speculation about where France is headed, and whether, as Cukierman suggested more than a decade ago, its Jews will “leave in large numbers.”
The riots are without doubt bad news for the 450,000 Jews in France—the largest Jewish community in Europe—if only because throughout history, social unrest, whether in France or outside, has dovetailed with antisemitic incitement. Jewish communities generally flourish under stable, moderate and centrist governments, while extremism and populism invariably spell trouble.
At the same time, it is important to understand that the violence French Jews have faced for the past quarter of a century goes far beyond rioting. Much of what they have experienced has been up close and personal—and frequently, bestial in nature, which is a reason to worry more about the present situation, not less.
It is important to understand that the violence French Jews have faced for the past quarter of a century goes far beyond rioting.
Take the 2014 rally against antisemitism where Cukierman spoke. The trigger for that gathering was not a riot or a boycott, or the vandalism of a synagogue or cemetery. Rather, it was something that you might call, especially if you were a French social theorist, a fusion of violence, power and intimacy; something, indeed, that provided a glimpse of the type of inhuman savagery that Israelis experienced on Oct. 7, 2023.
A few days before the rally, in the same Parisian suburb of Creteil, a young Jewish man who was expecting a package in the mail answered the door to his apartment. Three Islamist delinquent thugs burst in. For the next 90 minutes, the man and his 19-year-old girlfriend were subjected to the most appalling ordeal.
The couple was targeted because the thugs wanted money—and who better to demand money from than Jews, who are, in the antisemitic folklore of the French suburbs, believed to be dripping in wealth.
Their apartment was turned upside down, with the invaders taking special care to destroy any Jewish books and symbols on display. One of them drove a sawn-off shotgun into the man’s mouth, breaking his teeth. Another forced him to lie on the floor, dropping knives onto his back in the name of “my brothers in Palestine.” While he was kept prisoner, his girlfriend was dragged into another room in the apartment, where she was brutally raped.
This was far from an isolated instance. There was the 2005 case of Ilan Halimi, a young cellphone salesman who was abducted by a Muslim gang known as “The Barbarians” and brutally tortured as the kidnappers pressed his family—again, Jews, and so therefore wealthy — to pay a ransom. After three weeks of being chained to a radiator, starved, beaten and burned with lighted cigarettes, the gang dumped Halimi on rough ground near a train station, where he died before reaching a hospital.
In 2017, a Jewish family—Roger and Mireille Pinto, and their son David—underwent a similar trauma when a Muslim gang invaded their home in the Paris suburb of Livry-Gargan. Again, the motive was to rob “wealthy” Jews, and to do so with Nazi-like brutality. The 73-year-old Mrs. Pinto was punched and gagged, recalling later that she genuinely feared she would be raped, while Mr. Pinto, who was then 83, was beaten unconscious.
In the same year, the Jewish pensioner Sarah Halimi (no relation to Ilan) was beaten and thrown from the window of her apartment to her death by another Muslim thug who, when he wasn’t dealing drugs, attended a radical mosque near the Paris public housing complex where they both lived. That case is perhaps the most notorious of all because Halimi’s assailant—in a moment of utter shame for the French system of justice—was subsequently excused from trial on the ridiculous grounds that the amount of cannabis he had smoked prior to the attack had left him temporarily insane.
It was certainly rivaled by a similar case in 2018, when Mireille Knoll, a Holocaust survivor, was murdered in her apartment by two invaders seeking money, one of whom was a Muslim neighbor she had known since his childhood, who then set her lifeless body on fire.
Sadly, there are other examples of this type of intimate violence, as well as terrorism. French Jews will not forget the 2012 attack by an Islamist gunman, Mohammed Merah, on a Jewish school in Toulouse in which four people, three of them young children, were callously executed. Nor will they forget the 2015 attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris which resulted in the murder of four people who were shopping there.
In fact, in the depressingly long list of attacks on French Jews since 2000—when the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada in Judea, Samaria and Gaza launched a global wave of antisemitism unseen since the Shoah—rioting has played a fairly negligible role. True, in a single week in July 2014, pro-Palestinian rioters in Paris attacked a synagogue while a service was underway and Jewish-owned stores in the suburb of Sarcelles, but that remains the most notable case.
What is more pertinent is whether the current round of lawlessness will embolden more violence defined by the intimacy described above. And this time, it is reasonable to expect that such violence will be more consequential politically, as France heads toward a presidential vote that, if held today, would result in a victory for Marine Le Pen of the RN, the successor to the Front National. One also has to note the irony that, for many French Jews, a Le Pen presidency would be an outcome preferable to a triumph for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the antisemitic, far-left La France Insoumise (“France Rising”).
Either way, for the Jews of France, the great existential dilemma—should we stay or should we go?—remains very much alive.
