To the memory of my relatives, against whose wishes I became Israeli
By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — I was born on July 14, the day of the taking of the Bastille, France’s national holiday. In my home there was a cult of French culture. My main literature was French. I loved to read Dramas of the Revolution (“July 14th,” “Danton,” “Robespierre”) by the French writer Romain Rolland, who won the Nobel Prize for literature.
I did not like the revolution, but the psychology of revolutionaries described by the pen of this wonderful writer interested me very much. I lived in the country of the victorious October Socialist Revolution, and I wanted to understand who the revolutionaries were. There were some similarities between the French Revolution and the October Socialist Revolution in Russia. During both revolutions the monarch was overthrown and executed and terror was established.
It seemed to me that studying the characters of the leaders of the French Revolution would help me understand who the leaders of the USSR were, hidden from the people by propaganda. I loved Rolland’s works not only for the description of the heroes and victims of the revolution, but also for his wonderful book about the composer Jean-Christophe.
He was a fine music connoisseur, a professor of music history, like my mother’s sister. The history of music occupied me very much, for I lived in an apartment house, most of the tenants of which were musicians. The musicians in my building not only played a lot, but also talked about music, its history, and the great composers, which resonated with Rolland’s book about the great composer and music.
I could have been French, but I became an Israeli. I was born in Kiev, the capital of Soviet Ukraine. My grandmother, my father’s mother, graduated with honors from the Tsarist gymnasium and knew eight languages, but admitted to knowing only two – Russian and Ukrainian. Her native languages were Yiddish and Hebrew, but they were “abettors of Jewish bourgeois nationalism” and Greek and Latin were relics of tsarist autocracy. French and German were associated with the bourgeoisie disliked in the USSR.
However, during frank conversations, my grandmother spoke French to the children, my father and his brother. She would forget the capitalist nature of this language in order to say what she thought without fear of being understood by outsiders. For my father and his brother, French became the language of secret communication in the USSR. Father later became a professor of French literature at the University of Kiev.
The French writer Henri Barbusse, winner of the Goncourt Prize and a member of the French Communist Party, met with Stalin three times in Moscow, and with my father once. Barbusse admired Stalin, whom he called a modern Lenin. He persuaded my father, a newly minted graduate of the literature department at Kiev University, to become a Communist. But the father did not agree with his idol. My father’s meeting with Barbusse took place in 1935, and in 1937 Stalin’s repressions began, the victims of which were mostly Communists. His unwillingness to become a Communist then saved father’s life.
But in 1949, during the repressions against Jews, literary figures and artists, my father, a professor of literature and editor of the main Ukrainian literary magazine Homeland, was declared an enemy of Soviet literature and an adherent of bourgeois literature. Had he been a Communist at that moment, he would have been imprisoned. He was “lucky;” he was “only” fired from the university and from his position as editor of the magazine, declared a “foreign agent” and expelled from Kiev. His dismissal and exile ruined my parents’ family life.
Soviet literary officials called my father a “rootless cosmopolite,” a “passportless vagrant”, i.e. a person deprived of the right to his homeland, a “fan of Western literature harmful to socialism” because of his research on the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, who was called a “minor, petty-bourgeois poet” in the USSR of that time. It was because of his love for Heine’s work that my father was persecuted and expelled from Kiev. He was unable to stay in Ukraine and was forced to move to the periphery, to Soviet Central Asia.
Exiled from Soviet Ukraine, my father often compared his fate as an exile to that of Heine, who was forced to leave Germany and move to France. Despite the exile, my father continued to write and publish books about the German poet in Russian, Ukrainian, German and Japanese. He recalled Heine’s flight to France, comparing it to his own flight, and repeated the words of the German poet: “It would be easy to flee if one did not have to carry one’s fatherland with one’s soles.” France seemed to Heine a “brilliant milky way of great human hearts,” especially when he compared it to the starless sky of Germany – a country where there are no people, where there are only lackeys.
After the humiliation experienced in Kiev and accusations of lack of Soviet patriotism, my father liked to quote the critical remarks of Heine who compared primitive German patriotism (my father was referring to Soviet patriotism) to French patriotism: “The patriotism of the Frenchman consists in the fact that his heart is warmed, from this heating it expands, opens up. […] The patriotism of a German is, on the contrary, that his heart shrinks, that it shrinks like skin in the cold, that he begins to hate everything foreign and no longer wants to be a citizen of the world or a European, but only a limited German.” Apparently comparing his exile to that of his idol, my father liked to repeat Alexandre Dumas’s words about Heine’s exile from Germany to France: “Si l’Allemagne n’aimait pas Heine, nous l’accepterions volontiers.” (“If Germany doesn’t like Heine, we gladly accept him.”)
After divorcing my father, my mother married a physics professor and member of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Although he was a Jew, that is, a second-class citizen, he was a Communist, which was no longer dangerous after Stalin’s death. His father was educated as an engineer in France, as he could not study in the universities of tsarist Russia because of antisemitism. Like my grandmother, my stepfather’s father spoke French at home.
I began learning French in early childhood and by the end of high school I knew it at the level of the local Russian and Ukrainian languages. After my repatriation to Israel, I traveled to France frequently for research work in physics. There I met a French physics professor, a Jew who knew my stepfather and claimed that I could obtain French citizenship because I had French historical roots. I loved the language and culture of France, but I preferred to be an Israeli, if only because of my thoughts on “Where is France going?”
Life for most Arabs in the former French Maghreb is much worse than under the colonizers. Freedom from the colonizers was worse than unfreedom under their rule. Arabs fleeing national independence began to fill France. They came with “white flags” and “surrendered” to the mercy of the French taxpayer, against whom they had fought for independence at home and who now had to pay for their dependence in France. They don’t have to set off bombs to conquer France, a demographic explosion is enough.
Because of the large number of immigrants, France practiced multiculturalism, encouraging a shift away from national culture, from conservatism, and from Christian religiosity. Immigrants have separated themselves from the nationally and religiously faceless French and are proud of their religious identities. In France, one reads the thoughts and aspirations of Islamic citizens from left to right, in French. The correct way, however, is to read their thoughts in Arabic, from right to left.
The French are going along with the immigrants and are calling their country less and less France and more “republic,” emphasizing the prevalence of democratic values over national values. Where is a country going where it is indecent to talk about French identity and the Christian religion? The motto of the Great French Revolution “liberty, equality, fraternity” is being replaced by Muslim brotherhood, which does not need liberty, equality and fraternity.
Every possible kind of antisemitism existed in France: the Catholic, monarchical, anti-clerical antisemitism of Voltaire and Lebon, the racial antisemitism of Drumont and the anti-Dreyfusers, and finally there was Arab Judophobia. The anti-Jewish atmosphere in France is thickening because of the desire of the Arab world outside and inside the Republic to make Jews and Israel scapegoats.
Jewish schools and communities have been taken into protective custody in France against terrorist attacks and hooligans. Some forty thousand Jews, 7-8% of France’s Jewish population, have moved to Israel. French Jews, unlike Muslims, closely associated their community with France. Despite antisemitism, they were always patriots of France. During the Nazi occupation, 20% of the fighters in partisan units were Jews. Charles de Gaulle, the last President of the Fourth Republic, speaking at a parade in liberated Paris, said: “The synagogue gave more soldiers than the church.”
But in the years of multiculturalism, the patriotism of French Jews has waned. Their departure from the country is the evolution of a society losing its national character. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said in an interview in 2015: “If 100,000 Jews leave the country, it will no longer be France, it will lose its soul – it will mean collapse.”
British journalist Simon Cooper, who moved to France and obtained French citizenship two years before I last worked there, noted something that stood out to me during my time there: “When I moved to France in 2002, I witnessed with my own eyes the cultural revolution taking place in the country. Catholicism was virtually extinct (only 6% of French people now regularly attend mass). […] The non-white population continues to grow.” French political scientist Jérôme Fourquet, in his book The French Archipelago: the Birth of a Multiple and Divided Nation (2019), describes the cultural collapse of French society as a “post-Christian era,” as the French parting ways with Catholicism, as a “self-de-Christianization.” A recent study shows that there are as many Muslims in France as Catholics.
Eric Zemmour, a descendant of Algerian Jews, lost the French presidential election in 2022 by failing to convince the majority of French people to remain French. So, it seems to me that it is better to be Jewish in Israel than not to be French in France.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists massacred hundreds of Israelis. The paradox of Western civilization has manifested itself in a surge of antisemitism in many democracies: a crime that should have elicited unequivocal condemnation of the pogromists led to condemnation of their victims. Many pro-Palestinian demonstrators called for the continuation of the pogroms under the slogans of “liberating Palestine from the river to the sea.” These calls meant the destruction of Israel and the creation of a Palestinian Arab state in its place.
France’s large Muslim community, opposed to Israelis and Jews, received strong support from the left-wing extremists of the France Insoumise movement. The French environmentalist, socialist and communist parties, together with France Insoumise, form a single electoral bloc called the New Popular Front. Throughout the time since the pogrom in southern Israel, French left-wing extremists have stigmatized Jews by instrumentalizing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Political scientist Jerome Fourquet believes that this is a “new type of antisemitism” that is now developing in France, which in one way or another reflects events in the Middle East.
Fourquet calls it “suburban” or “neighborhood” antisemitism: “In the Paris suburbs and in Lyon, it has even come to the point of burning synagogues.” He also noted “the silent exodus of the Jewish population from these neighborhoods either to Israel or to other cities.” The very “neighborhoods” or “suburbs” that have become breeding grounds for the antisemitism that Fourquet calls “new” are the neighborhoods where Arabs and Muslims who have migrated to France live. The majority of them support the “liberation of Palestine” and oppose Israel. France is once again split into new Dreyfusers and anti-Dreyfusers. It is even harder for a French Jew to be French than before.
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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the academic college of education, and the author of 10 books.
I would be surprised if ONLY 100,000 Jews leave the country.