Alain Finkielkraut: nos enfants et petit-enfants devront peut-être faire leurs valises et quitter la France

Le journaliste américain (de gauche) Jeffrey Goldberg a consacré un très long article dans l'Atlantic à la situation précaire des Juifs en Europe et demande si le moment est venu pour les Juifs de quitter l'Europe. L'article commence avec une citation d'Edouard Drumont ("Tout vient du Juif, tout revient au Juif") et un entretien qu'il a eu avec le philosophe Alain Finkielkraut en janvier dans son domicile parisien.  Au moment même où débutait la tuerie dans l'Hyper Cacher.  Jeffrey Goldberg a posé à Alain Finkielkraut une "question très juive": ses valises sont-elles prêtes?  Non, répond le philosophe, mais nos enfants et petits-enfants n'auront peut-être pas d'autre choix que de partir.  (I asked him a very old Jewish question: Do you have a bag packed?  “We should not leave,” he said, “but maybe for our children or grandchildren there will be no choice.”)

For half a century, memories of the Holocaust inoculated the Continent against overt anti-Semitism. That period has ended—the recent fatal attacks in Paris and Copenhagen are merely the latest in a mounting tide. Today, right-wing fascist strains of Jew-hatred are merging with a new threat from radicalized Islamists, confronting Europe with a crisis, and its Jews with an agonizing choice.

“All comes from the Jew; all returns to the Jew.” Édouard Drumont (1844–1917), founder of the Anti-Semitic League of France

Alain Finkielkraut

The French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, the son of Holocaust survivors, is an accomplished, even gifted, pessimist. To his disciples, he is a Jewish Zola, accusing France’s bien-pensant intellectual class of complicity in its own suicide. To his foes, he is a reactionary whose nostalgia for a fairy-tale French past is induced by an irrational fear of Muslims. Finkielkraut’s cast of mind is generally dark, but when we met in Paris in early January, two days after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, he was positively grim.

“My French identity is reinforced by the very large number of people who openly declare, often now with violence, their hostility to French values and culture,” he said. “I live in a strange place. There is so much guilt and so much worry.” We were seated at a table in his apartment, near the Luxembourg Gardens. I had come to discuss with him the precarious future of French Jewry, but, as the hunt for the Charlie Hebdo killers seemed to be reaching its conclusion, we had become fixated on the television.

Finkielkraut sees himself as an alienated man of the left. He says he loathes both radical Islamism and its most ferocious French critic, Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s extreme right-wing—and once openly anti-Semitic—National Front party. But he has lately come to find radical Islamism to be a more immediate, even existential, threat to France than the National Front. “I don’t trust Le Pen. I think there is real violence in her,” he told me. “But she is so successful because there actually is a problem of Islam in France, and until now she has been the only one to dare say it.”

Suddenly, there was news: a kosher supermarket in Porte de Vincennes, in eastern Paris, had come under attack. “Of course,” Finkielkraut said. “The Jews.” Even before anti-Semitic riots broke out in France last summer, Finkielkraut had become preoccupied with the well-being of France’s Jews.

We knew nothing about this new attack—except that we already knew everything. “People don’t defend the Jews as we expected to be defended,” he said. “It would be easier for the left to defend the Jews if the attackers were white and rightists.”

I asked him a very old Jewish question: Do you have a bag packed?

“We should not leave,” he said, “but maybe for our children or grandchildren there will be no choice.”  More.