TRYING TO UNDERSTAND FRENCH SECULARISMSometimes the anti-Jewish acts of young Muslims are explained as a consequence of
their identification with Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation or of the
social exclusion and economic disadvantage suffered by Muslims in contemporary France.
Invariably such explanations are denounced by some in the media as tantamount to ‘‘ex-
cusing criminal violence,’’ and blame is placed instead on a world-wide Islamic move-
ment.^49 Nothing, it seems, could be clearer than this as an example of the social danger
of religious passion. And yet a very small proportion of French Muslims are practicing
followers of their faith.^50
The complicated emotional relationship of many French Jews with the Israeli state is
too sensitive a subject for most non-Jewish commentators to deal with publicly. A
thoughtful piece entitled ‘‘The Jews of France, Zionists without Zionism,’’^51 written by
Esther Benbassa (professor of the history of modern Judaism at the E ́cole Pratique des
Hautes E ́tudes), underlines the tension between the passionate attachment of French Jews
to the state of Israel and the ideological claim by the latter that all Jews belong in Israel,
‘‘in their own state.’’ Israel’s liberal democracy is, of course, distinctive in many ways. As
the state of the Jewish nation, it isnotthe state of all its citizens (there is a Palestinian
minority in Israel), and at the same time itisthe state of a large population of noncitizens
who are also nonresidents (Jews in other countries). Does the French state also include
and exclude citizens from the French nation? Not in quite the same way, for although
French Muslims tend to have strong sympathies with the predicament of Palestinians
under Israeli occupation (and Iraqis since the U.S. invasion), no foreign state beckons
themas Muslimsto come and join ‘‘their own state.’’
Nevertheless, my point is that both Jews and Muslims in France have complicated
imaginaries of distance and closeness, complicated emotions of belonging and rejection.
What is missing in Benbassa’s account, therefore, is a discussion of the implications this
tension has for the relations of French Jews with French Muslims, for both of whom
identity is at once local and transnational, and for whom memories embrace many differ-
ent times and tempos. And notably missing too is a consideration of the ambivalent
feelings of French Jews of Algerian origin for ‘‘Algeria’’^52 —at once nostalgic and fearful.^53
There is, in other words, a conceptual problem that lies beyond the friction between
Jews and Muslims in France. It concerns the idea—on whichlaı ̈cite ́is premised—that
secular citizens are committed to asingle nation(a single collective memory, as Renan put
it in his influential disquisition on ‘‘the nation’’) and therefore to aboundedculture.
Benbassa’s article shows that precisely because secularism is astatedoctrine, devised for
the purpose of dealing withstateunity, it does not fit well with a world of multiple
belongings and porous boundaries, nor can it acknowledge the fact that people identify
emotionally with victims in the past and with victims in other countries as ‘‘their own.’’
Her article helps one to understand that, for subjects occupying different sites, different
things are politically imaginable and therefore possible within networks of uneven con-
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