"The aliyah (the act of moving to Israel) of
French Jews has been significant over the last decade, the tally for 2016 being
5000. The French Jewish community is the biggest in Europe and is thought to
number around 500,000 people, most of them Sephardic and of North
African origin. This is the second-largest population
outside of Israel and the United States. The 5,000 departures in 2016
add to the record 7,900 who left in 2015 and 7,231 in 2014. The Jewish Agency
of Israel stated that that insecurity had been a "catalyst" for many
Jews who were already thinking of leavingThough violence is not the only reason people are leaving, with
family, religious and economic reasons also playing a role, yet one cant deny
the panic these recent horrific attacks in 2016 France have unleashed, biggest
among them were the Bataclan attacks and the 14th july 2016 attack
where a terrorist mowed down nearly 80 people with a truck.
In total, 40,000 French Jews have emigrated since
2006, according to figures seen by AFP. However, it has been observed that a
significant number of Jews who migrate, do choose to return eventually. The
number of those who return has been estimated to be around 10 to 35 percent.
Its hardly surprising because they cannot take the much harder life in Israel
in comparison to the relatively comfortable life in European countries.
Jewish
people have a nearly two millennia old
history in France, of running businesses and participating in public
life as early as the first century when Paris was part of the Roman
empire, and it has seen ups and downs of extreme ends, including everything, be
it exploitation, welcome, abuse, glorification and deportation. France, like its European neighbours has a
rich history of anti semitism, whether it be in middle ages or modern times. On 22 July, 1306 King Philip IV of
France expelled all Jews from his kingdom, the main reason being that he wanted
to seize the property of Jews to get the resources for funding with the Flemish and the currency revaluation problem. They
had to leave behind their belongings and had to leave the country only with the
clothes they were wearing and a small sum of money. Any Jew found after the
deadline was liable to be executed. Confiscating Jewish property and their
expulsion was a normal event in medieval times, as were in effect already the
king’s property. Just a few decades earlier, in
1290, Jews living in England were expelled by King Edward I, many of them had
moved to France. Unfortunately for them, France proved only a slight respite.
Earlier, the Lateran Council of 1215 summoned by Pope Innocent III banned
coexistence or working / trading between Jews and Christians. Jews were banned
from all trades except pawn broking and mending old clothes. They had to wear a
special garment to differentiate them from Christians. This applied throughout
the Christian world wherever canon law was followed (This was the yellow star
of David that the Jews had to wear in the Nazi occupied areas). They acted as
tax collectors for the king but this role was gradually taken over by Italian
bankers. So by the beginning of the 14th century they were no longer
indispensable to the crown. Jews had been expelled from France in 1182 by an
earlier King Philip and regularly throughout the 13th century but within a few
years they were allowed back. The auctioning of the Jews property was
still happening at the time of King Philip's death. His son Louis , who
succeeded him, allowed the Jews back in 1315. However by 1322 the Jews were
banished once more. This pattern of expulsion and return would continue for
decades. It concluded with the expulsion of 1394. This is regarded as the last exodus from France in the medieval
period. Jews returned as France expanded to the areas to which they were
banished.
Inspite of this, France in the
last two centuries has a much better record in tolerance in comparison to
Spain, Germany, Hungary or Poland among others. By the
19th century, though resentment remained
toward Jewish people, many Jewish citizens had risen to top business, military
and political positions — something that was nearly impossible in many
European countries. In contrast, in
Germany till 1800s, Jews had virtually no citizenship rights. In Tsarist
Russia, and eastern Europe , regular
pogroms against Jews were regular fare. In comparison, France had a Jewsih
Prime Minister , Léon Blum, who served three terms during the 1930s, and later
as a vice premier in late 1940s.
Incidently speaking, the birth of
Zionism was not at all inspired by Nazi atrocities. Its origins are a few
decades earlier, during the Dreyfus case
(1894-1906) in which Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer
of Alsatian and Jewish descent was sentenced to life imprisonment for allegedly
communicating French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. He was
imprisoned for nearly five years, before
being exonerated. Theodore Herzl, one of the founding fathers of Zionism,
witnessed crowds in Paris chant “Death to Jews” , calling for Capt Dreyfus’s
head, and it was one of the turning points for promoting Palestine as a
migration point to the Jewsih community worldwide. In 1895, Herzl wrote Der
Judenstaat (The State of the Jews), which argued that the Jewish
people should leave Europe if they wished to, either for Argentina or,
preferably, for Palestine, their historic homeland. During the second world war
, the Vichy government which was a Nazi
collaborator, rounded up and executed thousands of jews. A quarter of the historic Ashkenazi Jewish population in France died in the Holocaust of World War II.
During the last thirty years or so, the problem has
resurfaced, and in a much more threatening way, owing to a mass immigration
from Muslim countries into EU countries and also the rapidly falling birth
rates among western European nations. The majority population of Europe has
been hit bad due to this, and hence the other minorities cannot be expected to
fare any better.
The Gayssot
Act or Gayssot Law enacted on 13 July 1990, makes it an
offense in France to question the existence or size of the category of crimes against humanity as defined in the London
Charter of 1945, on the basis of which Nazi leaders were convicted by the Nuremberg Trails of1946. It is one of several European laws
prohibiting Holocaust
denial. But attacks on Jews have risen by
sevenfold since then 1990s and 40%of all hate crimes in 2013 were committed against
Jews, according to a study conducted by the European Jewish Congress and
Tel Aviv University in Israel.
Historically numerous North African Arabs
had lived and worked in France since before World War II, having emigrated to
France in the for economic reasons and to escape civil wars in their home
nations. The Muslim community built the Grand
Mosque in Paris in 1929. Its Imam and numerous members helped
protect Jews from deportation during the Holocaust. This sounds unbelievable in
today’s rapidly declining scenario of Muslim-Jewish relations. At least 1 in 10 Jews in France
have been physically assaulted for their religious identity, according to
a survey in Journal de Dimanche . Jews are less than 1% of the French
population, and they have become an even smaller minority due an influx of
predominantly Muslim refugees and immigrants in various ghettos and housing
projects in various cities, from the former French colonies of Algeria, Morocco
over the years, and now the Syrian refugees .
This sort of renewed jihad fuelled anti Semitism is not just
limited to France (Paris alone has more than 200 plus no go zones) but also all
over western Europe. British historian Maud S. Mandel in her book Jews
and Muslims in France: A History of a Conflict (2014) states that Muslim antisemitism
among second-generation immigrants in France is more prominent than the one
preceding them, due to various factors which lie in earlier inter-communal relations among the
peoples in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco following their life as a colony of
France and the decolonization in North Africa; and the Arab-Israeli conflict, and most
prominently the extremism funded by petrodollars.
Many other historians downplay this anti semitism and instead state that it is
a part of racism, much to the displeasure of the Jewish community.
It’s naïve to assume that anti-Semitism began and ended with
the rise and fall of the third reich. Anti Semitism has existed ever since
Christianity and Islam branched out of the same semitic tradition where Judaism
comes from. These three people of the book have hated each other since
centuries. Nazis merely borrowed elements from the
various church and royal dictats centuries before. Anti Semitism has its real
roots in the earliest Christians regarding jews as ‘’Christ killers’’, and it
is a fact that Jews were not given any kind of rights in any Christian or
Islamic kingdom (. They had been tolerated, because of their material usefulness,
but never accepted. Not just anti Semitism, most of the other Nazi trademarks
were rip offs. Nazi salute was a
straight lift off of the Roman one, the swastika emblem was a mutilated version
of the Hindu swastika, the racial profiling of Jews by having them wear the
star of David or regular pogroms against them were similar to what the Jews
endured in medieval Europe. In case of exterminating Jews, SS firing squads
were just an upgrade of planned jewish extermination by various kings.
Concentration camps were first used by British during the Anglo Boer war of
1899 (In which Mr Gandhi served proudly as a stretcher bearer). Even the idea
of gas chamber wasn’t original. Protestantism founder Martin Luther advocated Jewish homes and synagogues should be destroyed, their money confiscated, and liberty
curtailed and that they should be locked inside a building and burnt. All that
the Nazis did was replace fire with Zyklon B. Vatican too did nothing to
condemn the mass killings of Jews, Gypsies, central Asians and Russians during
WW II.
Holocaust
happened only because the local populace in the occupied territories had anti
semitic tendencies, be it Poland or Hungary or Lithuania or Ukraine. Most of
the Jew killing was done with the help of the collaborators in occupied
territories, whether it be mass shootings or deportation to death camps like Auschwitz .
Jews today face an enemy far greater than Nazism, and which
has roots of over a millennium and a half, simply because unlike Nazism or
Communism, it does not have a single power centre. Nazism finished with the
fall of the Third Reich, and Communism suffered a fatal blow with the
disintegration of Soviet Union. But jihad has no single base. A Chechen, a
Morrocan, a Pakistani, A Palestinian (whatever that means) or any other Arab
has the same kind of hatred for the Jews. Israel is a great example that there is
no other way than taking violence to your enemies. The European Jews who died
in mass executions and gas chambers during WW II were intellectuals, unlike their counterparts
in Palestine, who lived on little and fought hard for every inch of land. It is
them who did much of the fighting (joined by the other jewish settlers, most
prominently the eastern European jews) throughout the early 1900s to create a
base where the future Israel could form in 1948But one cannot live
by history alone. No matter how much bravely Israel has fought, it is still a
fragile state, and Jews outside it are as vulnerable as they were during
Kristallnacht or second world war.
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