French Ideals and French Reality
French Ideals and French Reality

In the wake of the brutal, calculated murders of Charlie Hebdo staff and Jewish shoppers on the eve of Shabbat, there has great plaintive speculation about the willingness and ability of France to defend its core Western, Enlightenment values.

Will the French unshackle themselves from political correctness, call the enemy who it is and proceed to defend unapologetically its core animating values?

This question has particular urgency for France’s endangered Jewish community. Jews in France have not only been singled out by Islamic terrorists, but also have made to feel further threatened by both the far Right and especially by the increasingly hostile ruling Left which is reflexively both anti-Israel, and pro-Palestinian.

Indeed there are those, such as France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who have recognized the critical significance of the threat to the Jewish community to the overall well being of France. Recognizing the proverbial “canary in the mine shaft” role that Diaspora Jews have long played in world history, Vallis rightly sees the threat to Jews as a broader, more encompassing one: to France itself.

Already Jews are being made to feel that their viability in France will somehow be key to France’s weathering an existential storm. This of course is a yet another difficult role to be thrust into, that potentially of the sacrificial lamb. The idea is that Jews need to stick it out in France in order to make sure the larger culture can endure.

Ironically this point was made recently by none other than would be Israeli Prime Minister Tzipi Livni, who criticized the call for French Jews to make aliyah as an unhelpful way to help resolve the situation in France.

The most eloquent witness to this disconnect between French ideals and French reality was none other than Theodor Herzl.
Aside from turning on its head one of the classic pillars of Zionism – that Israel is the safe haven for Jews anywhere, everywhere, any time -  and from demonstrating yet again that its ultimately all about Livni, this sentiment creates an incredibly tall order for Jews who simply want to be able to walk down the street without feeling that their lives are on the line.

What makes this willingness to turn the Jews into the test case for the durability of French civilization even more dubious and I believe ill-fated, is that all of the cries to return to the “true France, the essential France” might be based on a colossal fiction.

The true France, the France of “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” is a France of ideas,  aspirations and values but rarely one of historical reality. Like man’s all too brief sojourn in Eden, the experience of France has been bound in brief moments of approaching the liberal ideal, but far more often, engrained in the pursuit of nationalistic and imperialistic grandeur.

Even during the halcyonic days of emancipation and granting de jure equality to Jews there was the immense conditionality contained in the adage, “to the Jews as individuals, everything; to the Jews as a people, nothing.”

Ironically, perhaps, the most eloquent witness to this disconnect between French ideals and French reality was none other than Theodor Herzl. It was Herzl’s coverage of the Dreyfus trial that uncovered his eyes, unshackled him and set him straight as to the chasm between the ideals of France and what real life Jews could expect to receive from real life France.

That disillusionment became part of the historic necessity behind the creation of a nation state of and for the Jewish People.

So, while we perhaps hope against hope that the French do in fact wake up, and see the threat to their civilization from an Islamism that hates everything about it, let us not force our brethren to be the test case or the litmus test or the guinea pigs or the korbanot to see if it can all turn out for the best.

As difficult as the current state of affairs portends, the historical record provides no support for the idea that France will come through for the Jews.