France’s Trump is dividing the community
AHEAD of France’s elections next year, Éric Zemmour could become the country’s first major Jewish presidential candidate in the post-war Fifth Republic era. Recent polls have him pulling 16 per cent of the vote, placing him among the top challengers to President Emmanuel Macron.
But there’s a catch: Zemmour, the far-right journalist, public intellectual and consistent provocateur, hasn’t announced that he is officially running yet. And most of France’s Jews want nothing to do with him, for various reasons.
“He is a far-right politician and as such a danger to the republic. He may be Jewish, but he is not the voice of the Jewish community,” said Joel Mergui, president of the Consistoire, a centrist French-Jewish organisation.
Zemmour, 63, has cultivated a strong conservative following through a staunch nationalist and anti-immigrant philosophy that describes French society as under siege from Muslim and other foreign influence.
Some of his language has even led to hate speech convictions and fines – in 2011 he called Muslim immigrants “invaders” and in 2016 said that most drug dealers are Arab or African.
Some of his critics say his own heritage belies a hypocrisy: his parents are Sephardic immigrants from Algeria.
Until now, French-Jewish leaders and organisations have not spent much energy responding to Zemmour’s rhetoric, but his sudden meteoric rise to the top tier of the election polls – despite the fact that he remains lukewarm on a political career in interviews just months before the vote – has forced them to take public stands on the would-be candidate.
His approval ratings match, and according to some polls, exceed those of Marine Le Pen, who received a third of the vote in the final round of the 2017 elections as leader of the similarly right-wing National Rally party.
And the French-Jewish opinion on Zemmour from across the political spectrum has been complicated, in large part because of his views on a number of specifically Jewish issues.
ZEMMOUR, who has published several best-selling books on politics and society, has spoken openly about his Jewish identity, saying that he goes to synagogue occasionally where he wears a kippah. Nonetheless, he appears to support the idea of banning the donning of a kippah in public, along with other religious signs.
In a debate in 2016, Zemmour described wearing a kippah as a “religious selfie,” saying that having one on is to “impose one’s religion on others”. Asking Jews to wear them, he added, was akin to asking them to wear the yellow stars that the Nazis forced on them during the Holocaust.
Even more offensive to many French Jews is his defence of a controversial theory, according to which the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy government sacrificed foreign Jews living in France to save native French ones during the Holocaust. Accepted by some historians, it is hotly contested by others, who say the Vichy government also betrayed Jews with French citizenship.
“Vichy protected French Jews,” he said recently on CNews, a French Fox News equivalent.
Zemmour has also cast doubt on the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus, the French-Jewish army captain of German descent whose conviction on trumped-up espionage claims – subsequently overturned – was widely condemned as antisemitic. On a TV panel in 2020, Zemmour said even if Dreyfus was innocent, he may have been targeted “for being German, not for being Jewish”.
Zemmour can even irk some far-right French Jews who would figure to be some of his biggest supporters. Last year, he said on CNews that if Israel has nuclear weapons, Iran should not be denied them.
The French Jewish Defence League, a far-right group, in a statement said that although it “welcomes regularly and defends Eric Zemmour’s courage against the Islamists,” his remarks on Iran show “ignorance or bad faith that discredit his assertions”.
These takes, along with his broader ideology, have turned the majority of the French Jewish establishment and prominent French Jewish figures against him.
“He’s not a useful idiot – he’s a useful Jew and the new leader of Holocaust denial in our country,” wrote Francis Kalifat, the head of the CRIF umbrella group of French-Jewish communities, in an op-ed in French media.
Famed Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld and his son Arno wrote earlier this year in an op-ed in Le Monde that Zemmour “tramples national values as well as Jewish ones,” and declared that “Jews must fight the far-right”.
Bernard-Henri Levy, the well-known Jewish centre-left philosopher, penned an op-ed in Le Point last month in which he drew parallels between Zemmour and former US president Donald Trump, arguing both were inadequate choices for anyone who cares about Jewish values.
“Five years ago, I told American Jews tempted by Trumpism: Allying with it … could be suicidal. I now say the same to Jews in France tempted by the nefarious simplism of Eric Zemmour,” who denies “Jewish generosity, Jewish vulnerability, Jewish humanism and its foreignness,” Levy wrote.
Like Trump, Zemmour has leaned into a narrative of fear driven by the concept of ethnic replacement.
“There is a danger our country will die, its population being replaced by another one, it’s civilisation likewise replaced,” he said in an October 1 interview, in which he highlighted – as Trump did during his campaign – the difference between himself and the career politicians facing him, such as Le Pen and Macron, France’s centrist president, who is projected to win despite holding an approval rating lower than 40 per cent.
BUT Zemmour also has his share of Jewish supporters. The Tribune Juive, one of the community’s oldest publications, recently published a series of op-eds by people who either support Zemmour or feel compelled to hit back against his Jewish establishment critics.
In one of the articles, William Fitoussi, a conservative insurance agent from Paris, called Zemmour the “only politician seeking to end the inflow of millions, including the murderers of their brethren from the community”.
CRIF and Levy’s “revisiting Eric Zemmour’s Jewish identity is so nauseating that I couldn’t believe it at first,” wrote Elie Sasson, a Jewish dentist from the Paris area and columnist for the Tribune Juive in an op-ed published on October 17. “They are signalling his excommunication because he’s not a ‘good leftist Jew’.”
Rodolphe Sebbah, a photographer from Paris, in another Tribune Juive op-ed, lambasted who he called the “VIPs on the left” such as Levy, who admired former president François Mitterrand despite his personal friendship with the high-ranking Vichy official and Nazi collaborator René Bousquet.
Sarah Cattan wrote in the Tribune that Zemmour has “abject views that need debating, but not through his Jewish identity”.
Jean-Marie Le Pen – a notorious Holocaust denier and vocal antisemite who founded the National Rally party that his daughter now leads – is a firm supporter of Zemmour as well.
“The only difference between Eric and me, is that he’s Jewish,” the elder Le Pen told Le Monde in an interview published last month. “It’s difficult to label him a Nazi or fascist. This gives him greater liberty.”
Commenting on this, Patrick Klugman, a Jewish Socialist Party lawmaker in Paris’s city council, said earlier this month on RCJ radio, “It is a historical fact that saddens me no end but that I cannot hide: The hero of the French far-right identifies as a Jewish person, and his Judaism is seducing the worst antisemites.”
comments