To be a Jew is, quite simply, to be like anyone else. Having the same rights and the same duties. Submitting to the law, which is the same for all, when it protects and when it punishes. In other words, to be a citizen. This is the debt that for over two centuries Jews owe to France, the first country in Europe that made them citizens like anyone else. It is the source of the gratitude that Jews feel for the country where, for the first time after centuries of wandering and persecutions, they were able, in the words of Abbot Grégoire, “to rest their heads and dry their tears”.
But things are not quite so simple. For what does it mean to be a citizen? According to the famous words of Clermont-Tonnerre in 1790, to acknowledge that the Jews were citizens meant granting them everything as individuals and refusing them everything as a nation. This formula, and its underlying ideology, the intellectual mechanism that justifies it, need to be reconsidered today in a new light. For to be an individual like any other is the least one should expect as a citizen of the Republic. We acknowledge the victories won, we know how precious they are. However, there is no lack of reverence in stating that treating a Jewish individual like any other individual is just basic decency. On the other hand, to refuse any acknowledgement of a collective identity means – to say things with the crudeness which alone allows us sometimes to express what is true – to deny everything which binds Jews to each other around a common base of references, attachments and values which makes them not set apart, but distinct. To say that all citizens are equal is not to sat that they are all identical.
And this of course requires clarification. I wish to express two truths, with utmost clarity.
First, referring again to Clermont-Tonnerre’s words, French Jews are not, and do not claim to be, a nation within the nation. They are French, the heirs of the Enlightenment, and of this homeland of enlightened philosophers and equitable tolerance which has made us who we are.
Second, and this is no doubt much harder to hear today, Jews, over and above national borders, are a people. For sure, not a people founded on blood, genes or roots in a land. What they have in common is a heritage, a symbolic and meaningful heritage founded on a moral law, on texts and practices, a heritage sometimes only partially accepted, but a chosen heritage, forged by centuries of tormented history, preserved despite dispersions and affirmed despite persecutions. The manhunts of the Vichy regime convinced, sometimes through despair, those Jews who till then had doubted the meaning of their common destiny. CRIF is the heir of this awakened awareness.
The Jews have a language, a venerable and ancient language that they have literally brought back to life. And most of them also feel the spiritual strength that comes from a common home to which their thoughts are tenderly directed, Israel, a State, which is not a Jewish State, for it is open to all its citizens, but the State of the Jewish people. The fact that this State regained its sovereignty in Jerusalem means the surge of hopes conquered anew, a new dimension for our existence, for us Jews who, in the words of Elie Wiesel, can live outside of Israel but cannot live without Israel.
What I am trying to express here is the complementary strength that comes from these two identities, French and Jew. It is the meeting of two universalisms, Human Rights and the Ten Commandments. We are the ones who can pass them on, we are their heirs and witnesses. This meeting of the two places on us an obligation, namely to open us up to what others have to say. We must never forget it, despite the dangerous temptations to withdraw into ourselves. This is what makes us fully French, and we accept to be such through our belonging to the Jewish community, fully integrated in the French nation and rejecting all calls to a closed community.
The challenge, in a word, is to accept that Jews share an identity that goes beyond religious roots – which must, it is true, remain in the private sphere and, once more in the words of Clermont-Tonnerre, be the prerogative of the individual. Jewish identity is collective, it is the identity of a people, which is to say it is political. And that is why CRIF, the political organ of France’s Jewish community, speaks out in the Republic on behalf of that community, out of the demands of loyalty. In no way does it claim to represent “all” the Jews of France, in fact CRIF considers that it would be absurd and contrary to our national tradition to claim such authority. The Jews who identify with its ideas and its struggles are many, with a wide diversity of lifestyles and political positions.
We hope the day will come when a clarification statement like this one will no longer be necessary. Because we will have been understood – and consequently accepted not only as individuals, but recognised for what collectively we intend to contribute to our nation, France.
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