- As world leaders pay tribute to the seventy-five years of the liberation of Auschwitz, 20 Minutes wonders if Europe will one day have finished its work on itself, to put an end to anti-Semitism.
- How to explain that such discrimination persists at this point in time on the Old Continent?
- For Tal Bruttmann, historian and specialist in the Holocaust, returns for 20 Minutes to the history of anti-Semitism in Europe.
Seventy-five years ago, the Auschwitz extermination and concentration camp was liberated by the Soviet army. On the occasion of this special anniversary, forty leaders, including Emmanuel Macron, are going to Israel this week to pay tribute to the victims of the Shoah.
Beyond commemorations and the duty to remember the past, there is the question of anti-Semitism that is still current, particularly in Europe. An Ifop poll, revealed by Le Parisien on Tuesday, indicated that 34% of Jews in France felt threatened. Tal Bruttmann is a historian specializing in the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. He returns for 20 Minutes on the links between Europe and the discrimination of Jews.
Seventy-five years after the Holocaust, can we still speak of an anti-Semitic Europe?
No. Anti-Semitism is combated and rejected by the vast majority of states, and the majority of public opinion. This does not mean that it is not present in Europe, nor that at the moment it is not experiencing a clear recovery.
How has the expression of anti-Semitism evolved in Europe since the Shoah?
Before the war, anti-Semitism, like racism, was seen as a mere "opinion", without even mentioning that there were many state policies before the war and during the war in a number of countries. The Holocaust disqualified anti-Semitism, primarily that coming from the far right. After the war, the expression of anti-Semitism was very largely banished from the public sphere, and only found expression in restricted circles, even if it nevertheless regularly re-emerged in the spotlight.
There is much talk of the feeling of insecurity felt by the Jews in France. Is our country one of the most affected on the European continent by anti-Semitism?
France ranks among the countries most affected, because of the number of anti-Semitic acts but also the number of assassinations which have targeted Jews since the early 2000s. The phenomenon has long been denied and neglected - no mobilization after the Merah attacks for example and the murder of children.
Since the late 1990s, there has been a return of anti-Semitism in France, carried as well by the extreme right embodied for over a decade by Soral and Dieudonné, which constitutes a form of junction with sections of the far left who have no problem with anti-Semitism. To this is added anti-Semitism emanating from radical Islamism.
However, we see that in Germany (with the Halle attack for example) violence also manifests itself, while in the United States, anti-Semitism becomes violent and murderous, in largely unprecedented proportions.
Did the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe prevent the introspection of the countries of the Soviet bloc which France in particular was able to engage in?
Officially, anti-Semitism did not exist in the East. But at the end of the war, Stalin launched anti-Semitic policies, most of the time under the guise of "anti-Zionism" targeting "cosmopolitans without roots" as the Soviet terminology used to say. We are witnessing waves of arrests and executions. In 1968, Poland also launched an anti-Semitic policy under this cover, expelling the Jews and administrations from the universities and driving thousands of them out of the country. While far-right anti-Semitism was disqualified, that on the left, particularly in the Eastern bloc, largely continued to exist, including officially, under the guise of "anti-Zionism".
On the other hand in the Eastern bloc, the Shoah was not recognized, the official speech speaking of Soviet citizens (or others) victims of the fascists, in Babi Yar, in Ukraine, where 33,771 Jews were executed at the end of September 1941 for example. But this applies to all places, the word Jewish does not appear on the monument erected after the war.
Some countries carried out an introspection after the fall of communism, first of all Poland, where a significant part of the society was devoted to this subject, and a school of historiography of foreground appeared at the beginning of the year 2000. But with the nationalist power of the PIS for several years, we have witnessed a resurgence of anti-Semitism, in various forms. Officially, it was the Nazis who killed the Jews, throwing in the shade the responsibilities of certain parts of the population where anti-Semitism was alive.
Is Anti-Semitism Similar to the West and the East?
The soil is the same, as are the springs. However, there are differences depending on the country. In Poland, the “blood crime” (accusation dating back to the Middle Ages, according to which the Jews kidnap children to kill them and use their blood…) remains particularly significant - while in France this type of accusation has completely disappeared since the Middle Ages.
The main difference lies in the way the states in the East were formed, not on the model we know in France, where since the Revolution citizenship has been confused with nationality. In the East, the States, in particular with the Second World War, were multinational (a Soviet citizen was of Russian, Ukrainian, Tatar or Jewish nationality for example). The Jews constitute a nationality, which is no longer the case in Western Europe since in particular the French revolution, which made the Jewish fact solely religious, while in the East it remained national. Which therefore makes it possible in a certain way to consider that the Jews were a foreign nation, that their fate does not concern the national history of such or such country ...
Is there something anti-Semitic specific to the European continent that does not exist elsewhere?
Anti-Semitism is above all a European history - and thought - which spread from Europe from the 19th century onwards. Almost all thinkers and theorists of anti-Semitism are European, or Western. The fact remains that anti-Semitism has also been widely exploited in the Middle East, by the regimes in power, as part of the fight against Israel. Mein Kampf , the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, etc. were widely distributed from the 1950s, for example, and certain States (Iran, Saudi Arabia) have financed, or even continue to finance, anti-Semitism internationally.
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