Certainly, this column published in The world on September 11, 2023, did not go unnoticed. Director and psychoanalyst Gérard Miller claims that “the French Jewish community is definitively fractured”, “a large number of French Jews having decided to link their fate to that of Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour”. He adds that “never, at any time in their history, have such a large number of French Jews lost their moral compass to this extent” and that by “framing with the worst, far-right Jews endanger the whole nation as their own community”.
This forum leads me to make a few observations.
Gérard Miller does not mention any sources. What is it based on? Surveys, polls, social networks? However, such a judgment would have been worth respecting certain methodological rules.
Let’s start by recalling that the share of the population declaring themselves Jewish in France is low (0.67% of the total population, approximately 440,000 Jews). It also represents only 0.6% of the electorate, a sample too small to be significant (260,000 voters in 2014, according to Ifop). However, only one survey sheds light on the subject. In 2014, an Ifop study published for Atlantico revealed that 13.5% of voters declaring themselves Jewish said they had voted in favor of Marine Le Pen, compared to 4% for her father. Certainly, during the 2022 presidential election, some results were mentioned (Sarcelles, Saint-Mandé, polling station no. 7 in the 20th arrondissement of Paris and the vote of the French in Israel). In these rare offices, if we note a regrettable breakthrough in favor of Eric Zemmour, these results are not representative, if only because the communities who live in these neighborhoods are more religious than elsewhere and because in Israel, few voters go to the polls. Then, the electoral choices of Jews depend on several factors and variants, as for the rest of the electorate. Finally, a common sensitivity linked to anti-Semitism and Israel does not necessarily imply the same electoral behavior, quite simply because there is heterogeneity in this electorate and in the Jewish community.
Yes, Jews vote for the far right and it’s unfortunate. But to claim so abruptly that “far-right Jews endanger the entire nation” is purely and simply a fantasy or a hackneyed stereotype (of Jewish superpower). How many are they ? How many members, activists, sympathizers? Does Gérard Miller know? And even if there were a few thousand Jewish voters voting for the extreme right, in what way do they represent a greater danger “for the whole nation” than, for example, practicing Catholics or non-practitioners who vote for the far right and the countless non-Jewish activists and sympathizers of the RN or Reconquest?
Secondly, there is a particularity in this forum. Gérard Miller, who is close to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, affirms that the Jews have changed sides and he regrets that they are no longer necessarily left-wing. This article is published after an intense controversy was sparked by the publication of an anti-Semitic tweet from Medina and after his friends from LFI defended the rapper, who received a standing ovation at the LFI summer school. This last example should have questioned the author. But he apparently does not understand that anti-Semitism is transversal, that it also develops in neighborhoods and suburbs, among French people or immigrants of Muslim faith and in part of the left, what a recent study reveals (1).
Gérard Miller does not want to hear that the radical left and its friends have abandoned the fight against anti-Semitism, relegated indefinitely and of which only a distant memory remains, often out of clientelism and so as not to displease some of their voters. He does not understand that she lacks empathy with regard to the feelings experienced by French Jews. The psychoanalyst prefers to overwhelm, arouse suspicion, essentialize, because some Jews would no longer be on the left and/or others would become horrible reactors. One last point, and it is important, the Jews of this country did not wait for Gérard Miller for them to become aware of the existential danger represented by the extreme right and most of them, I assure you, have not lost “their moral compass”.
* Marc Knobel is a historian and essayist. He published Cyberhate. Propaganda, anti-Semitism on the Internet, at Hermann in 2021.
(1) “Radiography of anti-Semitism in France”, Fondapol, 2022 edition.