Where the situation of France’s Jews is concerned, a brief example
will help drive home the historical point. On May 10, 1990, in the
southern town of Carpentras, one of the country’s oldest Jewish
cemeteries was desecrated: more than 30 tombstones were uprooted, and
the body of a recently buried eighty-one-year-old man was exhumed and
displayed next to an umbrella. The contrast between 25 years ago and
today? As the SPCJ pointed out in its 2014 report, older citizens still
remember how the desecration of the Jewish cemetery in Carpentras
“brought the French people to the streets,” whereas in 2006, “after the
anti-Semitic murder of Ilan Halimi, and in 2012, after the attack
against the Jewish school in Toulouse, rallies were almost exclusively
composed of members of the Jewish community.” In January 2015, if Jews alone had been killed and not cartoonists,
Jews alone would have been marching in protest in the streets of France.
All French Jews understand this. As so often in history, anti-Semitism
in France today is a symptom of the degeneration of the social bond.
"The Twilight of French Jewry, the Twilight of France", Alain El-Mouchan (Here)
