The antisemitic derangement

The antisemitic derangement by Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe

Even before last week's terrorist attacks in Paris, the French prime minister was concerned about the continued viability of Jewish life in France. In an interview with The Atlantic prior to the Charlie Hebdo and kosher supermarket massacres, Manuel Valls made a grim prediction:

"If 100,000 Jews leave, France will no longer be France. The French Republic will be judged a failure."

His misgivings were far from groundless. An exodus of French Jews is already underway and accelerating rapidly. In 2012, there were just over 1,900 immigrants to Israel from France. The following year nearly 3,400 French Jews emigrated; in 2014 approximately 7,000 left.

For the first time ever, France heads the list of countries of origin for immigrants to Israel, and the ministry of immigration absorption expects another 10,000 French Jews to arrive in 2015.

That would mean more than 22,000 Jews fleeing France for Israel in the space of just four years, nearly 4.5 percent of the country's Jewish population. The departure of 100,000 French Jews might once have been inconceivable. No longer. In a survey last spring of France's Jewish community, the largest in Europe, three out of four respondents said they were considering emigrating.

These are staggering numbers — all the more so in a "Jewish community that has been in place for centuries and feels itself deeply attached to being French," as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has written. But what is driving so many Jews to leave "is not Israel's pull…. It is France's push."

Over the past 15 years, that "push" — violent eruptions of French antisemitism — has grown relentless. The murder of four Jews by jihadists at the Hyper Cacher market on Friday was only the most recent on a long list of ominous events, including mob attacks on synagogues in Paris last summer, and the targeting of Jewish teens with Tasers, tear gas, and pepper spray.

To his credit, the French prime minister has been forthright in his condemnation of Islamist anti-Semitism. Over the weekend he declared that France was at war "against terrorism and radical Islam," a war in which "journalists were killed for drawing" and "Jews were killed because they were Jewish." But strong words from a prime minister will not halt the antisemitic derangement, and Valls is right to fear what that derangement would mean to France's future well-being.

Anti-Semitism is commonly regarded as a variety of racism, but the prolific English historian Paul Johnson suggests that it should be seen as a kind of intellectual disease, fundamentally irrational and highly infectious. It exerts great self-destructive force, Johnson wrote in a notable 2005 essay, severely harming countries and societies that engage in it. In a pattern that has recurred so predictably that he dubbed it a "historical law," nations that make Jewish life untenable condemn themselves to decline and weakness.

At a shop in a Jewish section of Paris, a notice says the business has been compelled
 "by recent events" to close temporarily. (AP Photo)

For example, Spain's expulsion of the Jews in the 1490s, and its subsequent witchhunt of the converted "New Christians" who remained behind, meant a loss of Spanish financial and managerial talent at the very moment the New World was being opened up to lucrative colonization.

That had "a profoundly deleterious impact," Johnson argued, "plunging the hitherto vigorous Spanish economy into inflation and long-term decline, and the government into repeated bankruptcy." More than 500 years later, Spain — where, incidentally, Valls was born and lived until his teens — still regrets that self-inflicted wound, and has looked for ways to rectify it.

Johnson pointed out other prominent examples of the phenomenon. Czarist Russia's persecution of Jews, reinforced by the encouragement of brutal pogroms, fueled a massive migration of Jews to the West, especially to Britain and the United States; those countries' cultural and entrepreneurial gain was Russia's debilitating loss. Germany's descent into demonic Jew-hatred under the Nazis ended in devastating military defeat, followed by a decades-long Cold War rupture and the end of German renown as Europe's intellectual center.

The Arab world, steeped in antisemitism and obsessed with the Jewish state, squandered vast oil riches "on weapons of war and propaganda," wrote Johnson. "In their flight from reason, they have failed to modernize or civilize their societies, to introduce democracy, or to consolidate the rule of law." Arab culture once led the world in learning, innovation, and pluralism. Today it is a world leader in almost nothing, save fratricidal violence and Islamist fanaticism.

France's Jews are leaving, and that never bodes well for the society driving them out. The prime minister puts his finger on it: If there is no Jewish future in France, if the antisemitic cancer has metastasized so alarmingly that tens of thousands of French Jews are ready to flee, then France will indeed no longer be France. It will be something darker and more deformed, wrecked by an injury it inflicted on itself.

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The Jewish state's newest hero wasn't Jewish

The Jewish state's newest hero wasn't Jewish from the files of Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe

Israeli police officers carry the coffin of their colleague Zidan Saif, an Arab Druze
who died after being shot during a terrorist attack in a Jerusalem synagogue.

By the thousands they streamed to Yanuh-Jat, Israelis of every description making their way on Wednesday to the remote northern Galilee district, where a fallen hero was to be buried with full honors. Israel's president, Reuven Rivlin, was there to pay his respects; so were the minister of internal security and the nation's top police commissioner.

From around the country, hundreds of black-hatted haredi ("ultra-Orthodox") Jews came on chartered buses, disembarking to join throngs of Arabic-speaking Druze in traditional white turbans, police officers in dress blues, and so many other mourners that even the roofs of nearby homes were crowded with onlookers.

They had come to bid farewell to Zidan Saif, the Druze police officer who was the first responder on the scene of Tuesday's massacre at a synagogue in Jerusalem. Saif had put himself between the terrorists and the worshipers, taking a bullet in the head and dying of his wounds that night. Befitting a defender who had died in the line of duty, his coffin was draped with Israel's flag, its blue Star of David prominently centered.

Like many of the Jewish state's loyal sons and heroes, Saif wasn't Jewish. That didn't make him any less an Israeli, just as Israel's sizeable Arab and non-Jewish minorities don't make it any less the sovereign Jewish homeland. Nor did it diminish even slightly the honor and gratitude Israelis across the spectrum expressed for the slain officer.

In his eulogy, Israel's president extolled Saif as "one of the first guardians of Jerusalem." A rabbi from the Jerusalem synagogue where the bloodbath had occurred told residents of the village he had come "simply to be with you and to cry with you," and called the "devotion and the determination" of the 30-year-old patrolman "an example to us all."

There have always been pessimists convinced that Israel's multiethnic Jewish democracy is doomed to fail. For some, the horrific images from the Bnei Torah synagogue, where peaceful scholars were hacked to death as they prayed, their blood drenching phylacteries and turning prayer shawls crimson, only encourages such fatalism.

"The attack on the synagogue in Har Nof," wrote commentator Joel Pollak, sends the message that "Jews and Arabs may not be able to live together easily even in the same country." A New York Times analysis was bleakly headlined: "In Jerusalem's 'War of Neighbors,' the Differences Are Not Negotiable."

For all the savagery of the terrorism that has sent so many innocents over the years to early graves, though, the funeral of Saif is poignant evidence that peaceful coexistence is not only possible in the Jewish state, it's a daily reality, woven into the warp and woof of Israeli life.

Of course there are tensions, disputes, and resentments, just as there are in every imperfect democracy — and what democracy isn't imperfect? Yet Israel from the outset has risen to the challenge of building a society held together by centripetal forces stronger than the centrifugal differences pushing it apart.

Indeed, the Jewish state's declaration of independence, proclaimed by David Ben Gurion in May 1948, explicitly implored the country's non-Jewish inhabitants to remain "and participate in the building-up of the state on the basis of full and equal citizenship." A great number did remain — including many thousands of Arab Druze — and went on to share in the blessings of Israeli freedom, democracy, and equality.

It's still a work in progress, but largely a successful one. The small Jewish state with the notable Arab minority not only survives but thrives, the implacability of its worst enemies and the violent instability of its neighborhood notwithstanding.

Yes, terrorism is a grim plague. Yes, the toxic Palestinian political culture that incites it is growing worse. All the same, Israel manages to stand out as an oasis of pluralism, respect, and tolerance in a part of the world not known for those qualities.

Israeli police officer Zidan Saif holds his baby
daughter in a family snapshot. Saif was killed
in the line of duty on Nov. 18, 2014.

One of the strongest condemnations of the synagogue slaughter came from — of all people — Bahrain's foreign minister, who blasted the "killing [of] innocents in a house of prayer." Khalid bin Ahmed Al-Khalifa warned sharply that "those who will pay the price for the crime of killing innocents in a Jewish synagogue and for welcoming the crime are the Palestinian people."

It was startling to see such strong language from a senior Arab official, especially when many Palestinian officials were "welcoming the crime," quite exuberantly and openly.

But as journalist Evelyn Gordon pointed out in Commentary, pragmatic Arab governments like Bahrain's know quite well that at a time when Muslims are being butchered and abused by fanatics across the Middle East, "mosques in Israel and the West Bank — including Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque — remain among the safest places in the Mideast for Muslims to pray."

That's no small achievement, even if the world does take it for granted. Terrorists may have killed Zidan Saif, but his memory will be a lasting blessing, for Jews and non-Jews alike.

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Who will rest and who will wander?

Who will rest and who will wander? from the files of Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe

Kurdish carry the few belongings they have left after crossing
the border between Syria and Turkey near the southeastern
town of Suruc on Sept. 20, 2014.

There is a transfixing passage in the High Holy Day liturgy, recited on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which depicts God sitting in judgment of mankind, reviewing each person's deeds and deciding who will live and who will die.

Ominously, the ancient prayer enumerates the awful ways a life can end. "Who by water and who by fire; who by sword and who by beast; who of hunger and who of thirst; who by earthquake and who by plague…"

Then comes a shift. Something else is at stake: "Who will rest and who will wander."

The juxtaposition seems incongruous. Can those condemned to "wander" in the year ahead — to be exiled, displaced, to be forced to flee — be likened to those who will meet death by sword or plague? The uprooted and evacuated, after all, can always make new lives for themselves elsewhere. The dead cannot.

Of course it is true that many refugees successfully start over, and the rabbis of antiquity who composed this prayer would have been the last to deny that where there is life there is always hope. But like Jews since time immemorial, they knew only too well how terrible the fate of refugees and dispossessed migrants can be.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported in June that for the first time since World War II, the number of refugees worldwide exceeds 50 million. "We are witnessing a quantum leap in forced displacement in the world," said António Guterres, who heads the UN's refugee agency. "There is no humanitarian response able to solve the problems of so many people."

This flood wave of suffering and disaster shows no sign of having crested. In just the past week, more than 150,000 Kurdish refugees from Syria have fled into Turkey, which was already reeling from an influx of 1.5 million refugees displaced by the Syrian civil war. At least as many Syrians have poured into Lebanon and Jordan.

"It is the war in Syria that most dramatically illustrates how quickly a country's fate can be upended by civil war," observes the New York Times. "In 2008, it was the world's second largest refugee-hosting country.

By 2013, it was the world's second largest refugee-producing country." Yet Syrians constitute only a fraction of the planet's desperate exiles, asylum-seekers, and expellees. Millions more have been driven — by fear or violence or hunger or persecution or natural catastrophes — from their homes in Afghanistan, Somalia, Burma and elsewhere.

The plight of certain groups of refugees — Vietnamese boat people, Sudanese migrants from Darfur, victims of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Cubans escaping a Communist tyranny — will sometimes touch the heart of societies fortunate enough to be blessed with domestic tranquility and prosperity. Far more commonly, they will be resented or spurned or ignored.

Or worse: Australia last Friday signed an agreement to transfer asylum-seekers to Cambodia, rather than grant them safe haven on Australian soil. When a wave of child migrants from violence-plagued Central American countries crossed into Texas earlier this year, many Americans across the political spectrum demanded that they be sent back.

Like war, refugee flows have been part of the human condition since the dawn of history. And if any people has known the anguish of being forced to "wander," it is the Jews, whose history is replete with banishment and exile.

Jews know from painful experience what it means to suffer
exile and dispersion. Above, displaced Iraqi Jews arrive
in Israel in 1951.

In the Middle Ages, Jews were expelled en masse from England and France and Spain and Austria; in the 20th century they were driven by oppression and pogroms from Egypt and Iraq and Libya and Syria.

When the Pew Research Center, in a 2012 report, analyzed the religious composition of the world's migrants, it found that one in four Jews today live in a country other than the one they were born in — far and away the highest percentage of any religious group.

Not all who migrated fled in fear or from danger. But the Jewish people know from long and painful experience that "who will rest and who will wander" can be as momentous a fate as life and death.

In the final paragraphs of A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson writes: "The Jews were the emblem of homeless and vulnerable humanity. But is not the whole earth no more than a temporary transit-camp?"

That lesson could hardly be more urgent. Every minute eight more people become refugees, leaving everything behind to escape war, persecution, or terror. No one can relieve all the suffering that dreadful statistic represents. But surely each of us can relieve some of it.

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