Those Who Forget the Past

by Ron Rosenbaum

  “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 imposs
ible 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.

  “Out there” is, in fact, ten Métro stops from the Place de la Concorde. It is a territory of class identification, behind a Maginot Line of French snobbism and disconnection, a Gallic sense of the insider and the other. It contains towns that are full of memories of France’s Vichy years—Drancy, where Simone de Beauvoir pushed food parcels through a barbed-wire fence to friends being deported to Auschwitz; Les Lilas, with its wedding-cake Hôtel de Ville, where Free French forces celebrated the Liberation.

  NEWS TRAVELS FAST in the banlieues. All that autumn and into the winter of 2001 and the following year, the attacks intensified, linked in severity to the politics of the Middle East. In Le Blanc–Mesnil, Ghozlan was getting nowhere with the French police. He distributed his S.O.S. forms in schools, community centers, and synagogues, and installed another telephone line at home. On the weekends, volunteers from his synagogue and his daughters—one of them a lawyer who handles Arab divorce cases—helped him. He became increasingly harried. He had calls to make to the authorities, E-mails to send. The pages in his white notebook grew—stones thrown through windows, fires set in schools, boys wearing yarmulkes attacked at Métro stops. Several times a week he would leave his house in his gray Renault and drive the roads he had been traveling for years to the police headquarters of Seine–Saint-Denis. The small houses along the way were neatly appointed, with assists from the Republic, their decent façades disguising the lack of jobs within. He went to see the chief of police and began to hear such new euphemisms as les desperados de cage d’escalier (desperadoes of the stairwell) along with the traditional term les voyous (vandals). “Sauvageons,” in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s sense of noble savages, had become a politically correct term for Arabs, along with “les jeunes” (the young).

  “Look, Sammy,” the chief told him, “they are doing the same things to the cops that they do to the Jews. They throw washing machines down from their apartments at police cars. They run into us.” “I understood it,” Ghozlan later told me. “They worried about appearing heavy-handed. There was a fear that they would be called thugs and Nazis. Several of my friends mentioned to me that they were afraid of creating a situation like in Los Angeles—another Watts.”

  That February, in Sarcelles, flaming objects were thrown into the Tiferet Israel School, destroying the building. In April, at Garges-les-Gonesse, firebombs were hurled at the synagogue. From Nice to Marseille, anti-Semitic mail was delivered. In the offices of CRIF, located in the Fifth Arrondissement several blocks from the popular food market on the Rue Mouffetard, an envelope arrived filled with white powder and a message: “The biological war against the Jewish lobby has begun.”

  IN LONDON in December 2001, in a now famous conversation at the publisher Conrad Black’s, the French ambassador, Daniel Bernard, called Israel “that shitty little country” and refused later to apologize. Then, in Paris, a Hanukkah screening of a Harry Potter movie reserved by the Jewish National Fund was canceled by the theater because of fears of Muslim violence. Very few of these episodes were reported in the mainstream press, but E-mails bombarded the office of Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, in New York. Foxman had long understood the delicacy of navigating within the French establishment. With a budget of $50 million, the ADL, headquartered in an eleven-story building across from the United Nations, has resources and a network of intelligence operatives that are inconceivable to most French Jewish officials. A little-known fact about French Jews is how underfunded their organizations are. Each year the Rothschild family contributes a significant amount of money to fund a myriad of budget requests—security guards, employees, operating expenses—to protect the Jews of France.

  “What we are talking about here is the need to understand that Jewish France has been traditionally controlled by the Hofjuden, the Jews of the court,” Shimon Samuels said to me the day we met. Samuels is an expert on the subject. He arrived in Paris from Jerusalem in 1980 and in 1988 set up an office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the organization responsible for tracking down many former Nazis. Trained in London and Jerusalem as a political scientist, Samuels was convinced that the new rise of Muslim fundamentalism had become a graver concern to the world than the capture and prosecution of octogenarians. He had the overview of a professor and used German words to describe the oddity of the French Jewish social structure. As the head of the Paris office of the Wiesenthal Center, he monitored potential terrorist and anti-Semitic activity throughout the world.

  GETTING IN COMMUNICATION with Samuels is a daunting task. His E-mail cannot be accessed in many of the strange places he travels, and his cell-phone message system is often overloaded or impenetrable. E-mails I sent him bounced back to me, and I got used to phones that didn’t ring and recordings that explained that Mr. Samuels was unable to receive messages. Much of his year is spent in zones of possible terrorist activity; he can “get by” in twelve languages. Rarely in Paris, he is a man in airplanes or at conferences in Third World countries. In Durban, where he participated in the U.N. World Conference Against Racism in 2001, he was expelled from the room. Later he witnessed demonstrators marching to a synagogue screaming, “Hitler should have finished the job!” It is his occupation to monitor the hate surging up in Islamic-fundamentalist quarters. A tireless lobbyist, he has an ability to forge political compromises. With me, the phrase he used to describe French indifference concerning what was happening in their country was “the black box of denial,” and he spoke of “the many-headed hydra” behind the attacks. He often sounded harried and snappish, the stern and rumpled professor who had no time for lengthy explanations. He understood that, for the establishment Jews of France, religion was secondary to their Frenchness. They maintained their status by being Hofjuden, skilled at shah shtil, the ability to whisper into the ear of the king.

  Samuels is British and spent his early years in Warwickshire, in the English countryside, with a family that sent him to Sunday school. Coming home one afternoon, he and his cousin were attacked by local boys, who stoned them and tied them to a cross in a field. “Incredibly, I wiped the event from my mind, as if it didn’t happen,” he told me. Immediately after that, he rejoined his parents in London. Years later he visited his grandparents’ grave, only to find that it had been desecrated. When he called the burial society to complain, he was told, “A storm destroyed it.” “The storm stopped on the Jewish side of the cemetery?” he demanded. “Suddenly what happened to me as a child came back in excruciating detail,” he said, “and I understood for the first time in my life why I do what I do.”

  SAMUELS DID NOT look forward to attending the CRIF annual dinner. CRIF always invited the prime minister and his Cabinet, and several hundred people attended the formal evening. For Samuels, the dinner was everything he disliked about working in France. A few months after his arrival in 1980, a bomb had been exploded outside the Rue Copernic synagogue in Paris. Four people walking in the neighborhood were killed. “Two innocent French persons were killed,” the then prime minister, Raymond Barre, had remarked. He was widely criticized for the implication that Jewish victims were an altogether different species from the French. Before setting up the Wiesenthal office in Paris, Samuels had worked as the deputy director of a strategic political-science institute in Israel. By the end of the 1970s, he had begun to have a strong s
ense of the rise of terrorism in Islamic-fundamentalist sects.

  In the winter of 2001, Samuels was having to navigate his own complex relationships within the French Jewish establishment, which was not ready to share fully his alarm at the attacks on Jews in the banlieues. Their focus was still on the traditional, Vichy model of historical right-wing anti-Semitism, and their concern centered on Jean-Marie Le Pen, who appeared to them to be a resurrection of the old hatreds. In 2002 he would pull roughly 20 percent of the national vote in the first round of the presidential election.

  For Samuels, the differences between the old and new forms of anti-Semitism manifested themselves when he pressed the case for reparations for French victims of the Holocaust. “Jews should not be about money,” a leader of a prominent Jewish organization told him. “It reinforces a negative stereotype.” Samuels was told he was un traître, a traitor, and berated for his American pushiness in trying to collect restitution for victims. In the late nineties, Samuels assisted a team of New York lawyers pursuing a class-action lawsuit against French banks for hundreds of victims. The case had further established Samuels as a scrappy outsider, trop américain, in certain powerful circles. On the subject of the CRIF dinner, he was not hesitant about voicing his opinion. “The Jewish community should set itself as an objective that they do not need a dinner with the prime minister,” he told me. “It sets in motion a set of political mortgages, where the prime minister has to give an accounting. And the Jews, like in medieval times, come to the court with their pleas. It is humiliating . . . an event in which the community is put into the position of having to be a supplicant.”