Those Who Forget the Past (27 page)

Although there were Jews on every level of political influence and intellectual stature in the country, the policy of modern France toward its Jews had been set during the time of Napoleon. “The Jews should be denied everything as a nation,” remarked Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre in 1789, “but granted everything as individuals.” Frenchness was what mattered. As one writer said to me, “I am French first, Jewish second. ” The most powerful Jews in France rarely identified themselves as Jews. To do so, one was being “Judeocentric,” a term used with contempt. Additional complicating factors were a long-standing French-intellectual romantic attraction to Third World guerrillas, guilt over the slaughter in the Algerian war, and France's need for Iraq's oil and trading alliances from Saudi Arabia to Morocco. All of this was filtered through the thrum of dormant traditional anti-Semitism, which could be revived without much provocation. “Old wine in new bottles,” one historian called it.

AFTER FIFTEEN YEARS at France 3, Weill-Raynal was well aware of the slanted coverage concerning the Palestinian-Israeli struggle. “We are not Israel,” he told me. “The motto ‘Jews is news' is a joke around here.” Members of his family had been deported to the Nazi death camps from Drancy, but he was closer in spirit to the “assimilated” Jews of central Paris.

Weill-Raynal had been initiated early into an understanding of the barrier of silence in the media. The standard was set at
Le Monde,
which characterizes the Israeli settlers as “colons” (colonizers). In 1987, in the days after the first intifada—the fight waged in the West Bank and Gaza settlements—Weill-Raynal was told by his editors not to file reports on the Middle East.

“You are too biased,” one told him.

“I asked them, ‘How am I biased?' The answer was simple. I was Jewish.”

The editor explained, “You cannot be fair.”

“It is a story I know very well. I know the country. I know the people. I know the roots of the problem,” Weill-Raynal said.

“No,” the editor insisted. “You are too biased.”

FRUSTRATED, WEILL-RAYNAL began to keep meticulous notes on Agence France-Presse, the wire service, a major source of information in the country. He immediately noticed an item the service used over and over to explain the violence in the Middle East, a controversial visit Ariel Sharon had made to the Temple Mount, the shrine known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, in September 2000. “This ran again and again without any counterexplanation of the terrorist attacks or the provocation,” Weill-Raynal said. “There was no subsequent reporting to place the visit in context. On the anniversary of the second intifada, they put out a revised report, and it was almost as biased. Now the news agency explained that, yes, in fact there were two versions of this incident—the Palestinian and the Israeli. It was as if it was inconceivable that the French might understand that there was a conflicting point of view.”

Just days after the demonstration, Weill-Raynal received a barrage of phone calls from Sammy Ghozlan about the burning of a synagogue in Trappes. “This is very serious,” Ghozlan said before he rang off to call
Le Parisien,
a tabloid that covers Paris and suburban news. Weill-Raynal knew Ghozlan as an activist and a minor local celebrity—the Sephardic Columbo with his Hasidic bands.

“What is this so-called synagogue burning at Trappes?” an editor had asked him.

“It is not ‘so-called,' ” Weill-Raynal had said. “It is an anti-Semitic attack.”

“It was a true French moment,” Weill-Raynal told me. “The editor immediately changed the subject and turned to the reporter next to me. He said, ‘Georges, what are you working on?' The next day
Libération,
a left-wing paper, ran it on the front page. The editor came to me and said, ‘You were right.' ” But no assignment to report the attack was forthcoming.

As Weill-Raynal walked through the Place de la République that day, he was sickened by the screams of “Kill the Jews!” Hundreds of protesters crowded the streets in front of the Holiday Inn on the Right Bank. TV cameras focused on signs that read SHARON KILLER. For years, he says, he had accumulated reams of skewed reporting from Agence France-Presse. Returning to his apartment near the Place de la Bastille, he turned on the TV. “It was catastrophic,” he said. “No one had reported what I saw, what I heard. No one had felt it was newsworthy to report ‘Kill the Jews.' ” Weill-Raynal realized that in all of Paris there was only one potential outlet for his dispatch, Judaiques FM. Jewish radio had arrived in Paris when the socialist government of the 1980s changed the licensing restrictions. The station, with a sizable audience in France, has become a powerful independent outlet of information for intellectuals and journalists. When I visited the studio, it seemed to be out of a different era. Just a few blocks from the Sorbonne, it could have been a radio station in wartime London or Nepal.

“How should we identify you?” the news announcer asked Weill-Raynal when he rushed in to make his report. “Suddenly I heard myself say, ‘Clément Weill-Raynal, president of the Association of Jewish Journalists of the French Press.' It was the moment when I knew I had to declare myself as a Jew. I said, ‘I want to get on and denounce a situation in Paris yesterday. The police were there. The Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between People was there. They shouted “Kill the Jews!” in front of the statue of the République. This is a scandal. Nobody stopped it. No one has denounced it.' And you know, once in your life, you are the right man at the right time.”

Just then Henri Hajdenberg, the president of Le Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF), France's main Jewish organization, was in his car. His brother had been a backer of another Jewish station, and Hajdenberg often tuned in to Judaiques FM for the news. “He heard me on the radio,” Weill-Raynal said. The next day, when Hajdenberg met with French president Jacques Chirac, he said, “Mr. President, I heard that demonstrators were shouting ‘Kill the Jews!' at the Place de la République.” As he left the Élysée Palace, Hajdenberg stopped to tell several reporters about the incident. “The president was shocked when I told him what had happened,” Hajdenberg told them. Later a member of the French parliament asked Lionel Jospin, the prime minister, for an explanation, but Jospin refused to investigate the incident. Weill-Raynal said, “I asked the question ‘Why has this taken days?' and the answer was ‘It's not so simple.' ”

I MET SAMMY GHOZLAN last September, a few days before the Jewish holidays. The Paris hotels were packed; the art dealers were in town for the antiques fair. As I left New York, Ed Koch, the former mayor of the city, had summoned his rhetoric against the French on his weekly radio show, angrily supporting boycotts. There were rumors of Jews wearing yarmulkes being beaten to death on the Champs-Élysées, and of killer apes unleashed to attack yeshiva boys. It was difficult to imagine that the Paris of
Amélie
had turned into
Badenheim, 1939.
Surely, I thought, this was shock-jock exaggeration.

Ghozlan was late for our meeting. I waited in a kosher pizzeria in the 19th Arrondissement, an area of shuls and Orthodox schools with a large Muslim population. Middle Eastern pastries glistened in the windows of the bakeries. The weather was warm, and the door of the pizzeria was open, so I could hear Ghozlan's voice before he actually walked in.
“Désolé, désolé,”
he mumbled like a chant as the door banged behind him. His white suit was rumpled; his gray Hush Puppies were scuffed. His reputation stuck out all over him. I knew he was thought to be—depending on who was offering an opinion—at the intersection of paranoia and truth, a one-man crime agency, and a folk hero of the banlieues. I scanned my American grid for a nuance to try to capture him, but the closest I could come was a tough, beat-up Yves Montand—hidden and canny, the receptacle of hundreds of lyrics memorized in the middle of the night, rehearsals, microphones, sound checks. Ghozlan had a clipped mustache, a low forehead, and thick dark hair; he was husky, but he moved with the agility of a dancer. He projected urgency, perpetual agitation. I imagined him leading his orchestra, a singing detective racing through lyrics at frenetic speed. The more time we spent together, the more I realized that what preoccupied him was his superimposed scrim of the past, the fear that the Algerian war would be refought in Paris.

I followed him out of the restaurant to a pastry shop at the next corner. The owner of the pizzeria recognized him from TV and followed us out.
“Nous avons peur, Monsieur Ghozlan,”
he said. “We are being attacked every day.” He stood very close to the retired policeman, as if proximity would provide safety. It was clear that he had no confidence in the local authorities. Ghozlan handed him the card for the hot line. “Call us,” he said.

THE PASTRY SHOP was deserted. Ghozlan placed police dossiers, files, and stacks of paper on a tray table of hammered Moroccan brass between us. He handed me a thick white plastic binder, the kind a high-school student might carry. In it were hundreds of reports, carefully written out by hand. At the top of each page were the words “S.O.S. Vérité-Sécurité” and, underneath, a box: “Formulaire de Déclaration.” A 2002 report from the 10th Arrondissement read:

I was in a taxi with my husband and I arrived in front of my building. I gave the money to the taxi driver and asked for a receipt and my husband went out of the car and I was waiting. She refused to give me the receipt and said, “You are a dirty Jew.” And then she spit at me,
proférant des menaces en arabe
[threatening me in Arabic]. She took off in the car and beat me with clothes she had in the front seat. Then she told me that her sons would kill me. I tried to call for help, but the taxi was moving too fast. At a red light, a young man saw me and came and helped me. He offered to be a witness. . . . The incident was shocking. Part of my family was deported to Auschwitz and did not come back. . . . And this is the first time something like this has happened to me. . . . Please do not mention my name. I am afraid that her sons will come to kill me.

A report from the town of Fontainebleau said, “Two 13-year-olds on their way to synagogue were hit with paddles. We will kill you.” An insult hurled at a teacher: “When the Messiah comes, each Jew will have 10,000 goyim as slaves!” Another provocation at a different school: “Have you read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? . . . Jews feast on the blood of non-Jewish children. They bake it in their matzohs. There is truth that they are all conspiring.”

Ghozlan drew a diagram to explain an episode that had happened in Sarcelles, a fifteen-minute drive from Le Blanc– Mesnil. “There was a school bus . . . maybe you heard about it? They came, they attacked it. The schoolchildren were shocked and scared. I heard that the police said, ‘It is expected because of what Israel does to the Palestinians. C'est normal.' ”

His voice rose. “The president of France has said, ‘There is no anti-Semitism in France.' What is the burning of the synagogue at Trappes? What are the Molotov cocktails thrown at the Jewish school in Créteil? And what are all of these?” He picked up the white plastic binder, flipped the pages, adjusted a pair of half-glasses on his nose, and began to read: “‘Sale Juif ' [dirty Jew] written on walls in Drancy. . . . Students wearing kippa attacked outside the schools. . . .”

OUT THERE. The phrase leapt at me from my first days in Paris. “We don't go out there,” I was told at a dinner in a grand apartment in the 16th Arrondissement, and there was a whiff of contempt in the tone. “The attacks are all happening out there,” said a doctor's wife, an active member of the Temple Beau Grenelle, which journalists and ministers attend.

I had come to investigate two questions: Had France become an anti-Semitic country? How would the policies of France affect the United States? I quickly sensed an odd, split-screen reality, a double narrative, two worlds of Paris, rarely colliding, trying to come to terms with a potential disaster. Anti-American best-sellers filled the windows of the bookshops on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. France was facing its fears of a République d'Islam on French soil. A work with a similar title was selling briskly in the stores, as was
Dreaming of
Palestine,
a young-adult best-seller published by Flammarion glamorizing suicide bombers. Teachers in the suburbs have been shocked to discover girls in the bathroom praying to Mecca as if they were performing an illicit act rather than simply practicing their religion. Some of the classes were 70 percent Muslim. Seminars on how to teach history, particularly World War II, were held for teachers who had experienced violence in their classes when they brought up the subject of Hitler and the Jews. Gang rapes—another frequent problem in the working-class suburbs—occupied the school authorities. All over the banlieues, I heard the code of modern France— Judeophobia, Judeocentric,
anti-feuj,
a term from a pidgin French called Verlan, the protest language of the banlieues. “Feuj” is a backward spelling of “Juif.”

Raising the subject of the hundreds of attacks on Jews was tricky business in central Paris. There was a moat around it, a moat full of alligators. It was impossible not to think I had somehow gone back in time to a world captured very well by Laura Hobson in her 1946 best-seller,
Gentleman's Agreement,
where the word “Jewish” was said in whispers. Every now and then some unpleasant remark would remind you that you were in the country that created the Dreyfus Affair, but mainstream French Jews do not make waves. Occasionally I heard someone say, “This is not Vichy.” It was a way to mute the drama of the alarming numbers, a method of self-reassurance that made the speaker seem above the fray of the statistics: Nothing to be alarmed about. The attacks were happening out there, as if that were Iceland, far away from the three-star restaurants and the Matisse-Picasso show at the Grand Palais.