Hatred of the Self, hatred of the Other: the case of Georges Bensoussan and a Jewish-Muslim relational break-down in France

• In Event: Politics of Hate? Crafting European Belonging through anti-Jewish Hatreds Old and New

Abstract

The trial of Georges Bensoussan by the Collectif Contre l’Islamophobie en France (CCIF) January-Febuary 2016 was a discursive indicator of contemporary mainstream relations between Jews and Muslims from North Africa or of North African descent, in France. The CCIF seeks to end the distortion of what it calls deux poids, deux mesures — the two different sets of scales applied to legal charges relating to anti-Semitic and Islamophobic acts. Operating within French law, their intention is to make racism against Muslims as important to a sense of French Republican civil community as racism against Jews.

In 2015 on French national radio, Bensoussan, a historian of the Jewish Maghreb, stated that “in Arab families, anti-Semitism is suckled on the breast of the mother”. These comments genealogize the anti-Jewish hatred that Bensoussan claims is extensive across the Arab world. In addition to the case brought against him by the CCIF, his unacceptable generalisation was also condemned by the Ligue Contre le Racisme et l’Antisemitisme (LiCRA). Nevertheless, an historical North African anti-Jewish lexicon, in its entanglement with politicised Islamic activism, does appear to have shifted from a discourse of revulsion to the realm of physical violence.

As an ethnographic observer of the relationship between groups of French Muslims and Jews from the Maghreb, or descendants thereof, this case provides me with an opportunity to discuss the discursive politics of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim hate speech past and present. I analyze how the CCIF-Bensoussan case played-out between French activists and intellectuals within the fields of Jewish and Postcolonial Racial Studies, which tells us about the delineation of the different ideas behind what constitutes a desirable French civil community, currently vying for political preeminence. I also endeavor to show that this confrontation strengthens a deeply concerning and ideologically-inflected breakdown in communication between groups with a shared history. Finally, I argue that in this jousting of mutual hatreds, people in fact hurt themselves.

Author

• Samuel Sami Everett, Cambridge University