I thank the four respondents to my Mosaic essay for their perceptive remarks. Their comments provide me with a welcome opportunity to clarify parts of my analysis about the Jewish situation in contemporary France.
In “The Ferment that Feeds Anti-Semitism in France,” Michel Gurfinkiel, a well-known specialist in this area, rightly highlights the constantly rising numbers of the French Muslim population—especially in the youth cohort under twenty-four—of whom 27 percent admire or approve of the barbaric Islamic State (IS). This is in itself a frightening statistic. He also notes that although a few French Muslim leaders did condemn recent jihadist brutalities, the rally they organized after the beheading of a French hiker in Algeria found little echo within their own Muslim constituency.
Equally troubling is the escalation of intra-Muslim violence on European soil. Earlier this month, in the center of Hamburg, Salafists savagely attacked a peaceful Kurdish demonstration. Although this act of violence had no Jewish dimension, the Islamist fanaticism that drove it also happens to be the most lethal element in the “new anti-Semitism.” Unfortunately, we can expect more proxy wars of this kind, sometimes wholly unrelated to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, in an already fragile European Union.
I am less persuaded than is Gurfinkiel by the explanatory force of French geographer Christophe Guilluy’s somewhat schematic distinction between an “Elite France” (pro-globalist, pro-Europe, and prospering in the big cities) and a “Peripheral France” made up of losers in the globalization sweepstakes who are utterly neglected by the establishment. There is no doubt that such a polarization does exist in France; indeed, it has been present in various permutations throughout much of modern French history, alongside the partly related anti-Jewish and anti-American trends on the far Right and Left. True, too, this “periphery” is currently a pillar of support for Marine Le Pen’s National Front. Yet the ressentiment of the “poor whites,” although not at all dead, strikes me as having lost much of its former potency as an active ingredient in contemporary French anti-Semitism in particular. It does, however, retain some potential for a future populist mobilization against the “Islamicization” of France, should things become more violent in the cities.