ABSTRACT
In 1791, revolutionary France, inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment, the rights of man, and republican equality was the first European nation to emancipate the Jews fully. Jewish criticism of the French government’s pro-Arab policies quickly led in some Gaullist circles to charges of dual loyalty and insinuations that Jewish solidarity was incompatible with the security of the French state and its national interests. The visceral racism and antisemitism of the Neo-Nazi Right in France, which never altogether disappeared in postwar years, found encouragement in new climate of suspicion towards Jews engendered in the 1970s. The consistent antagonism to the Jewish state displayed by ‘progressive’ French intelligentsia since 1967, especially in the prestigious Le Monde, was a further source of anxiety and concern for many French Jews, especially when it began to slide into the murky waters of anti-Jewish prejudice. The greater assertiveness of French Jews and their emotional solidarity with Israel clearly owes much to North African immigration.
