56 Jackie 1930–1962
but this was commuted in 1946 to lifelong national disgrace, plus
the confi scation of his property. At one dinner, where there were
many former members of Vichy present, one of the women guests
said: ‘Oh, the Jews, personally I can smell them a mile off , Monsieur
.. .’ ‘Really?’ replied Derrida in a loud voice. ‘Well I, Madame, am
Jewish.’ Which caused quite a chill around the table.
A few days later, Jackie wrote a long letter to his friend. In a tone
both fi rm and calm, he explained that he had no right to conceal his
Jewishness, even if this question struck him as ‘artifi cial’. His ‘condi-
tion as a Jew’ did not defi ne him more than anything else. He never
made much of it, however, except when he was confronted with any
display of anti-Semitism: this was a position close to that developed
by Sartre in his Refl ections on the Jewish Question published in 1946.
Derrida used the incident to compare the French situation with that
he had experienced in Algeria:
A few years ago, I was very ‘sensitized’ to this topic and any
allusion of an anti-Jewish type would have made me furious. At
that time I was capable of reacting violently. [.. .] All this has
calmed down in me somewhat. In France I have known people
who remained quite untouched by any trace of anti-Semitism. I
learned that in this area, intelligence and decency were possible,
and that this saying (unfortunately common in Jewish circles)- ‘everything that is not Jewish is anti-Jewish’ – was not true.
It has become less of a burning issue for me, it has retreated
into the background. Other non-Jewish friends have taught me
to link anti-Semitism to a whole set of defi ning factors. [.. .]
Anti-Semitism in Algeria seems more immovable, more con-
crete, more terrible. In France, anti-Semitism is part, or claims
to be part, of a doctrine, of a set of abstract ideas. It remains
dangerous, like everything which is abstract, but less tangible in
human relationships. Basically speaking, French anti-Semites
are anti-Semitic only with Jews they do not know.^36
Derrida claimed that he was convinced that ‘when an anti-Semite
is intelligent, he does not believe in his anti-Semitism’. He would
like, he said, to have had an opportunity to discuss the incident
again with his friend and the latter’s parents. In his reply, Claude
Bonnefoy seemed not to measure the full extent of what had hap-
pened: ‘So here in the château we are all overcome by remorse over
a few words [.. .] doubtless frequently uttered as a cliché.’ Mulling
over the situation, he insisted on the diffi culty his parents now faced,
being ‘offi cially damned, excluded from society’. And as if to get
Jackie to forget the unfortunate phrase, he suggested that the latter
participate, in the form of articles or short pieces, in the journal La
Parisienne that the writer Jacques Laurent (a friend of his parents