Abstract: To date, scholars have rarely talked about contemporary antisemitism and Islamophobia in France as part of a single story. When they have, it has typically been as part of a framework for analyzing racism that is essentially competitive: some depict Islamophobia as less a real problem than a frequent excuse to ignore antisemitism; others minimize antisemitism as an unfortunate but marginal phenomenon by comparison with the pervasive nature of anti-Muslim racism in French society. This article argues that the two are inseparable, and it focuses on a hitherto overlooked set of connections: in the era since the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher in January 2015, at key flash points that question Muslim belonging in France, the position of Jews has repeatedly been invoked in ambiguous, contradictory ways. Participants in these public debates have sometimes forcefully maintained that Jews are unlike Muslims, since they have long been fully integrated French citizens. At other moments, these discussions have raised the specter of Jewish ethnic and religious difference. By emphasizing Jewish particularity, such debates evoke, perforce, the past twenty-five years of controversies about the allegedly problematic attire, food, and beliefs of France’s Muslims. The article focuses on several key moments, from the speech of Prime Minister Manuel Valls before the French parliament in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks, to the kippah and burkini affairs of 2016, to the provocative comments of candidates in the 2017 presidential elections concerning Muslim and Jewish religious and ethnic markers of difference.
Abstract: In the context of the Dutch immigration debate, tributes to the Holocaust and the memory of Europe’s dead Jews increasingly serve to dismantle multiculturalism as a failed paradigm and to drive a wedge between a revitalized, redeemed, color-blind, post-racial Europe and disenfranchized immigrant, minority and Muslim populations. Embedded in these invocations of the Holocaust and its moral imperatives is a ‘spectropolitics’ of tolerance, in which tolerance, staged as an essential touchstone of Dutch identity, supplies a differential norm that measures the civilizational and racial disjuncture between Europeans, minorities, and Muslims, and validates the new dual paradigm of Dutch citizenship and immigration policy: securitization and disciplinary integration. The centrality of the Holocaust as paradigmatic of Dutch and European racial history meanwhile sidelines the colonial past as constitutive of European identity; displaces an alternative understanding of race as (bio- and necro-political) instruments of colonial rule; and disavows the continued application of these instruments of racial rule in Dutch and European post-colonial societies.
Abstract: The apparent resurgence of hostility toward Jews has been a prominent theme in recent discussions of Europe; at the same time, the adversities faced by the continent’s Muslim population have received increasing attention. In Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe, Matti Bunzl offers a historical and cultural clarification of the key terms in this debate. Arguing against the common impulse to analogize anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, it instead offers a framework that locates the two phenomena in different projects of exclusion.
According to Bunzl, anti-Semitism was invented in the late nineteenth century to police the ethnically pure nation-state. Islamophobia, by contrast, is a phenomenon of the present, marshaled to safeguard a supranational Europe. With the declining importance of the nation-state, traditional anti-Semitism has run its historical course, while Islamophobia threatens to become the defining condition of the new, unified Europe. By ridding us of misapprehensions, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia enables us to see these forces anew.
Abstract: In this contribution, I examine the Catholic political practice of “intercessions” (shtadlanut) as a means to control and manage relations between state power and Jewish communities by means of a privileged elite. While governmental techniques or mechanisms of minority management are only part of a broader question of majority–minority power relations, the theological-political roots of such “management” strategies are often overlooked because the problem is assumed to be secular. In my analysis of shtadlanut, I show how Jewish communities were internally divided between “good” and “bad”, “managed” by the ruling powers, and homogenized. It is precisely this type of enforced collaboration with power, in combination with reduced agency and de-politicization, that I claim goes beyond the “Jewish Question”. Rather, we must turn our gaze on Europe and consider how, and why, it continues to make 'others' into problems. By doing so, we can challenge the frame of the contemporary "Muslim Question".
Abstract: This article explores contemporary images of Jews and Muslims in Norway by using qualitative empirical data, namely the answers to an open-ended question that was included in a quantitative survey on attitudes towards Jews and other minorities in Norway, conducted in 2012. The target group for the survey consisted of Norwegian residents aged 18 and above. A total of 1522 people answered the questionnaire. The results of the survey can be considered as representative of the Norwegian population with respect to age, gender, education and geographical distribution.
Respondents were asked what they regarded to be the reasons for existing negative attitudes towards Jews and Muslims respectively. This article analyzes whether the perceptions reflected in the respondents’ answers represent stereotypical views and partly include traces of conspiracy beliefs. The article also discusses these perceptions within the broader perspective of Norwegian society, asking in which ways the data reflects ideas of inclusion and exclusion.
The analysis exposes differences regarding traditional stereotypes and prejudices against the two minorities and the ways in which these prejudices are linked to (perceived) contemporary conflicts and tensions – both within Norwegian society and internationally. Negative attitudes towards Jews are often explained with reference to the role played by Israel in the Middle East conflict, and almost never with specific reference to Norwegian society. The material contains few examples describing Jews as scapegoats for current social problems in Norway. On the contrary, respondents’ answers indicate social distance. Approximately half of the answers claim that negative attitudes towards Jews are due to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The images of Jews presented in connection with this conflict are predominantly negative and characterized by topics such as oppression, ruthlessness and power. The analysis shows how these statements serve to reduce complexity by effectively equating “Jews” with “Israelis”. As a consequence Jews seem to be excluded from the notion of the Norwegian national collective.
The statements about Muslims show that they are regarded to be citizens and as such part of Norwegian society, but with characteristics perceived as problematic and threatening. Respondents often connected negative attitudes towards Muslims with a “foreign culture”. Many statements describe Muslims as oppressive to women, as harboring undemocratic attitudes or as criminals.
The data shows how people develop generalizations, describing something as “typically Muslim” or “typically Jewish”, reflecting current debates and media coverage. Such generalizations derive their strength from placing the speaker in a morally superior position. In the present material these attitudes represent the antithesis of an implicit notion of the Norwegian community as a liberal, egalitarian and peace-loving society. Despite the differences, a clear picture emerges that the characterizations of both Jews and Muslims seem to serve a common function: to provide a contrast to this national self-image. Such polarized notions of “us” and “them”, however, undermine the values generally constructed as “Norwegian”: when “the other” bears problematic features that we do not want to acknowledge in ourselves or our communities, we lose the ability to critically reflect on who we are. While maintaining an idealized notion of “us”, we become increasingly dependent on a rejection and denial of the “other”.
Abstract: Relations between Jews and Muslims in Amsterdam grew tense after the conflicts between Gaza and Israel in 2014, the violent attacks on Jewish targets in Brussels (2014), Paris (2015) and Copenhagen (2015) and local incidents of online, verbal and sometimes physical discrimination. Nevertheless, these factors also inspired Jews and Muslims to launch cooperation projects and strengthen the bonds already existing between them. Cooperation in turbulent times is not always easy. The data collected for this research show how Jews and Muslims in cooperation projects use to strategies to solve some of the problems confronting them. The three most widely used strategies that were found are ‘searching for similarities’, ‘decategorizing’ and ‘avoidance’. These strategies do not emerge in a vacuum, however, but at a certain moment in time, in specific fields. Therefore, this article, will describe the usage of the three strategies and explain the interaction between strategies and their contexts.
Abstract: En France, les juifs sont inquiets, ils constatent que l'antisémitisme dans le pays s'étend et revêt un tour meurtrier. Les musulmans, eux, sont soupçonnés de passivité ou de compréhension pour le djihadisme, leur intégration bute sur le racisme et les discriminations, et leur seule existence sur notre territoire a relancé les passions relatives à la laïcité. Enfin, notre république est en crise, impuissante bien souvent à se conformer à son propre idéal d'égalité et de fraternité.
Il est temps de transformer cette crise en débat et de repenser le vivre-ensemble. C'est ce que propose ce livre, à partir d'une hypothèse originale : les juifs et les musulmans, au-delà de ce qui les sépare, ne sont-ils pas les mieux placés pour réfléchir à l'aggiornamento du modèle républicain français ? Pour permettre à la France de mieux affronter les grands périls actuels – le terrorisme, le racisme, la haine et l'intolérance – et pour préciser les contours d'un nouveau modèle à même de conjuguer les valeurs démocratiques et le respect ou la reconnaissance des particularismes ?
Farhad Khosrokhavar est spécialiste de la question de l'islam et de la radicalisation, Michel Wieviorka de la violence et de l'antisémitisme. Tous deux montrent par l'exemple comment musulmans et juifs peuvent contribuer à rebâtir activement notre république.
