Commentary Magazine..
15 January '16..
This week after yet another brutal attack on a French Jew, one of the community’s leaders drew an ominous yet rather obvious conclusion. Reacting to the vicious assault on a Jewish man on his way to morning prayers by a Turkish-born radical Muslim who said his crime was committed “in the name of Allah,” the head of Marseille’s communal Jewish organization advised fellow Jews to stop advertising their identity. To be more specific, Zvi Ammar said Jewish men should cease wearing kippahs in the street “until better days.”
Ammar has been sternly criticized by other Jewish leaders, including those from the CRIF — the umbrella group of national Jewish organizations in France — who say his comments are akin to surrender to anti-Semites and terrorists. They’re right to point out that anti-Semites won’t be satisfied by driving Jews into hiding. Moreover, to abandon the streets to Islamist thugs is tantamount to saying that Jews can’t live openly as Jews in France. If European Jewry is to have any future in an era when anti-Semitism is on the rise, it can only be by standing up for who they are and what they believe in, including support for Israel, rather than cowering in fear.
But as wrongheaded as his Ammar’s advice might be, it must also be conceded that his approach might be rooted more firmly in reality than the brave talk coming from other Jewish leaders or the inspiring rhetoric we’ve heard in recent months from French political leaders about defending the rights of their Jewish citizens. It may well be as French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said last week while commemorating the anniversary of the terror attack on the Hyper Cacher market in which four Jews were slaughtered by the same Islamist cell that committed the Charlie Hebdo massacre, that the thought of Jews leaving the country because they were no longer safe was, “an unbearable idea.” In his view, “France without Jews is not France.”
Maybe so. But the reality of France — as well as much of Europe — in 2016 is that Ammar is right in assessing the danger to the Jews of Marseilles. Anyone who walks around in parts of the city overtly proclaiming their Jewish identity is taking their lives into their hands. That’s why immigration to Israel — a place where Jews can and do defend themselves against Jew-haters and where the expression of Jewish identity is guaranteed — is rising from France as well as the rest of supposedly enlightened Western Europe.
The France that Valls wants to believe in may be a secular republic where equal rights for Jews, Muslims and all religious and ethnic minorities are not called into question. But the Jews of Marseilles and Paris don’t live in such a place anymore. They understand that although the ringing speeches about fighting anti-Semitism we hear after every attack on Jews is comforting, neither those words nor other gestures of solidarity are going to protect Jews that are singled out for brutality by Islamist thugs.
While one should be careful not to exaggerate the danger, the frequency of attacks on Jews is discouraging and enough to impact the mentality of a community that understands that Europe is changing.
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