French Jews Fleeing the Mess They Helped Create

In Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission (which I’ll write a review of at some point in the future), there is the character of Myriam, the protagonist’s on-again, off-again girlfriend. Through the novel’s imagined course of political events, Myriam comes to represent those Jews in France who, upon the Muslim Brotherhood winning national elections in France, rapidly emigrate from France to Israel, no longer feeling safe in the former. And, perhaps more significantly, Myriam finds a new sense of purpose and belonging upon moving to the largely Jewish ethnocentric and Jewish nationalist state.

In other words, the very French Jews who promoted ethnic heterogeneity in France (given how Jews don’t like it when a single religious group such as Catholics dominates the host country they have emigrated to) eventually begin to feel the unintended consequences of their ‘moral universalism’. Once the wonders of Diversity™ have essentially destroyed indigenous French cultural identity, the blowback effects of an emboldened Third World immigrant class starts to be felt, in the form of violent anti-Semitism, and the said French Jews flee to the one country (other than the U.S.) where they are most welcome.

From the AP:

JERUSALEM (AP) — Jewish immigration to Israel from western Europe has reached an all-time high as a result of a rise in anti-Semitic attacks, a leading nonprofit group said Thursday, as France’s beleaguered Jewish community grapples with whether to refrain from donning Jewish skull caps for their own safety.

The Jewish Agency, which works closely with the Israeli government and acts as a link to Jews around the world, told The Associated Press that 9,880 western European Jews immigrated to Israel in 2015 — the highest annual number ever. The figure is more than 10 percent over the previous year and over double the 2013 level.

The vast majority, close to 8,000, came from France, where a rise in anti-Semitic attacks has shattered the sense of security of the world’s third-largest Jewish population.

Just this week, a machete-wielding teen attacked a Jewish teacher in the southern French town of Marseille, prompting a local Jewish authority to ask fellow Jews to refrain from wearing their traditional skullcaps to stay safe. That sparked counter calls from other French and Jewish officials who said such a move would be a capitulation to terror…

France’s Jewish community of some 500,000 is the largest in Europe. Jewish schools and synagogues are often surrounded by soldiers in combat fatigues who patrol the streets with automatic rifles. Though Jews make up less than 1 percent of the population, French officials say more than 50 percent of all reported racist attacks in 2014 were directed against them.

I didn’t realize that France had the world’s third-largest Jewish population.

Nor did I realize (as I would soon discover), there are only 186,000 Jews living in Russia!

This got me thinking.

There is little doubt that the abovementioned violence against Jews in France is exclusively the handiwork of Muslim ‘refugees’ and the like. Anti-Semitism among indigenous French, however, is non-violent and much more subtle. I would imagine the cultural omnipresence of disproportionate Jewish influence in French society is pronounced, much as it was in Weimar Germany and the U.S. today. I would also imagine that in polite conservative society in France, no one talks about the 800 lb gorilla in the room, which is also true here in the U.S.

In “I am French”, Jeremy Harding reviews Emmanuel Todd’s Who is Charlie? Xenophobia and the New Middle Class (2015). Yes, that title is as awful as you’d expect. The review is a case of a leftwing liberal critiquing an even farther leftwing liberal. Both individuals are largely apologetic and excuse-fostering for non-assimilating Muslims in France. And while Harding criticizes Todd for over-simplifying the sentiments of indigenous French, Harding voices his horror at what he sees as residual, reflexive anti-Semitism among French whites:

Todd can be perceptive and chilling: in his worst-case prognosis, he foresees a revival of historic Jew-baiting, once the peripheral middle classes have succumbed to ‘bad feelings’ – I guess he means the dread and disaffection seeping across France – and reactivated an ‘old Catholic anti-Semitism’ in a ‘new zombie version’. He already has form as a forecaster: in the 1970s he explained why the Soviet bloc was about to crumble, and went on to argue at the turn of the century that Europe’s future lay beyond Nato expansionism in a rapprochement with Russia. In Who is Charlie? he gives us glimpses of a benighted France, caught between anti-Arab sentiment and anti-Semitism, with large parts of the population inclined to both. Where I live, in the south-west bulge of the agnostic centre, elderly, practising Catholics – who still exist – are as likely to be anti-Semitic as they are Arabophobic. It’s never ‘personal’ of course, but the easygoingness of the anti-Semitism can take your breath away. As for ‘Islamophobia’, it’s the construction of the Arab, not the Muslim, that’s striking in these cases. Unlike Todd, I worry that anti-Islamic rhetoric throughout the centre and the periphery is simply Arabophobia – a resilient strain of French racism – dressed up as secular high-mindedness.

Where there are higher ratios of Jews to a country’s overall population, might one see a ‘correlation’ of sorts for:

A) characteristic Jewish cultural impact (e.g., cultural liberalism, pro-immigration interest groups, etc.), and

B) levels of ‘anti-Semitism’ (aka, rational, historical, ethnocentric responses qua KMac) in response?

Such an analysis might prove more fruitful by comparing the ratio of Jews to the ratio of indigenous people of the respective country. For example, France is full of northern Africans and Arab Muslims. If you exclude their count from the denominator, and only include indigenous French in the denominator, the ‘Jew ratio’ in France increases significantly.)

Wikipedia has a table reflecting Jewish populations in the world by country or territory. The source of this table, and its definition of ‘Core Jewish Population’ is defined as follows:

Below is a list of Jewish populations in the world by country or territory. Unless otherwise indicated, core and enlarged population numbers are taken from DellaPergola’s chapter “World Jewish Population” of the American Jewish Year Book of 2014. Where other credible sources present competing numbers these are presented with a range and citation. DellaPergola’s population figures are primarily based on national censuses combined with trend analysis. Regarding definitions, he has described the “core Jewish population” in the diaspora as “all persons who, when asked in a socio-demographic survey, identify themselves as Jews; or who are identified as Jews by a respondent in the same household, and do not have another monotheistic religion.”

I re-sorted this table based on the ‘one Jew per # people’ column, as this would perhaps more accurately reflect the level of influence Jews have in the respective countries. (I’m not entirely sure what they mean by ‘Enlarged Jewish Population’ but surmise it means those who identify as ‘Jewish’ but who don’t exhibit the ethnocentric traits of the ‘core Jewish population’.)

With a ratio of 1.32-to-one, Israel has the world’s highest Jew ratio, which is no surprise.

We can ignore Gibraltar, whose gross population numbers are miniscule.

So, who is the ‘real’ #2 country? Why, the good ‘ole U.S. of A., with a ratio of 56-to-one.

The ratio drops by half with the next country, Canada, and then drops even more dramatically with the remaining countries.

Could relatively low Jew Ratios be why sweeps of nationalism (and anti-immigration sentiment) are occurring across Eastern European countries, the latter unimpeded by political correctness, Holocaust™ guilt, and the like?