TALAL ASADstraint and sentiment. There is much more to national emotions than selective memory
and forgetting (Renan), as I shall argue in a moment.
However salient anti-Semitism is today, as a social phenomenon it seems to me to be
given greater emotional recognition by French politicians, public intellectuals, and activ-
ists than parallel expressions of prejudice against Muslims.^54 This asymmetry is due in
part to a general sense that anti-Semitism has been the cause of greater cruelty in modern
Europe than anything perpetrated by anti-Arab racism or by anti-Islamic phobias. It is
not easy to measure experiences of cruelty against one another, but there is no doubt that
the systematic attempt by the Nazis to eliminate all of Jewry within the modern nation-
state is without parallel. Yet the cruelties perpetrated by the French in Algeria were not
minor. They stretch from destroyed villages, orchards, wells, and fields during the con-
quest in the nineteenth century through numerous massacres of Muslims to the torture
chambers of the Battle of Algiers in the twentieth century.^55 But all this is remembered
(and therefore reexperienced) as having taken place ‘‘outside France,’’ and the victims are
thought of as ‘‘non-Europeans’’ (as their successors in France still are), and therefore to
be taken less seriously.
In an interesting book on the symbolic role of the Holocaust in France, Joan Wolf
has shown how the meaning of that event for Jews has been appropriated by diverse
groups for their own discursive purposes. ‘‘After the 1990 desecration of a Jewish cemetery
at Carpentras,’’ she writes, ‘‘the nation denounced the ‘fascist’ Le Pen in a narrative that
was tantamount to a repudiation of Vichy and an identification with its Jewish victims,
and the Holocaust came to stand for the suffering and innocence of the French people at
the hands of the evil and guilty Vichy regime.’’^56 Wolf points to the gap between the
Jewish experience of trauma and the non-Jewish political rhetoric of victimhood under
the Vichy regime. Certainly the Nazi racial persecution of Jews followed by their mass
murder remains the dominant element in Jewish collective memory—and therefore in
their sense of victimhood. Wolf has virtually nothing to say, however, about the involved
and evolving relations between Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Algeria both before and
after the struggle for independence. These relations tend to be differently nuanced in the
collective memory of each group of immigrants in secular France. French Muslims have
their own collective sense of victimhood (apart from contemporary Islamophobia in
France, there are memories of colonial Algeria, images of Israeli suppression of Palestin-
ians, etc.). But here I want to draw attention to the symbolic dependence of a morally
restored France on the public recognition of Jewish suffering. This linkage, I suggest,
carries its own emotional charge, one that makes it easy to substitute ‘‘Islamic fundamen-
talism’’ (read ‘‘Islam’’—and so ‘‘Muslims’’) for Vichy’sideologicalanti-Semitism, and
thereby intensifies public distrust of French Muslims as dangerous outsiders within the
gate. The values espoused by Vichy are now claimed to be an interruption of ‘‘real
France.’’ although Vichy was no less a part of modern France than themaquiswas.^57
PAGE 512512.................16224$ CH25 10-13-06 12:36:30 PS