A sharp rise in antisemitic incidents in France after 2000, perpetuated for the most part by young people of Muslim Arab extraction, has provided for ample discussion both in the popular media and among academics in France and the United States. While these analyses have been a springboard for discussion of the disaffection of Muslim Arab youth and the reasons for their negative attitudes and behaviors toward Jews, little attention has been paid to Jewish perceptions of the Muslim Arabs. In her provocative new book Rhinestones, Religion and the Republic: Fashioning Jewishness in France, anthropologist Kimberly Arkin takes on this topic, and in so doing, provides a brilliant analysis of the complicated legacies of colonialism, antisemitism and nationalism in contemporary France.
Arkin's book is a case study based on fieldwork that she began in March 2004 in three Jewish day schools in the suburbs of Paris. Her fieldwork came to an abrupt end in December of that same year, when she was removed from the schools following the leak of a paper abstract that she was preparing for a graduate student conference. The abstract incensed school administrators because it highlighted an uncomfortable reality: the prevalence of anti-Arab racism and racialized understandings of Jewishness pervasive among day school students. Indeed, Arkin begins her book by recounting her surprise at fifteen year-old “Margot's” explanation of why she had not attended a well-publicized demonstration against antisemitism in Paris on the previous weekend. She couldn't attend an antiracist rally, Margot explained, because she was a racist: “I hate Arabs,” she clarified to a shocked Arkin by way of explanation (2). Margot's disinterest in the rally also stemmed from a larger disinterest in French politics, as she assumed that her future would be in Israel rather than in France.
Rhinestones, Religion and the Republic unravels the how and why of Margot's attitudes and behavior, which Arkin found were in fact representative of adolescents in all three day schools under study. Through both historical analysis of the impact of French colonialism on Jews in North Africa and the evolution of French identity and ethnic politics in the post-World War II years, Arkin argues that Margot and her fellow students were faced with a series of “structural binds” that led them to distance themselves from Arab Muslims, racialize their Jewish identity, and refuse to think of themselves as French or envision their future in France.
In chapter one, “French ‘Natives’ and Native Jews,” Arkin compares and contrasts Jewish political, cultural, and economic development in France and North Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, highlighting the ways in which French colonialism in North Africa created a series of paradoxical situations for its Jewish populations. In contrast to Metropolitan attempts to negotiate Jewish Frenchness by playing down difference with the majority population, Arkin notes, North African Jews rather invoked their difference as Jews in order to avoid being conflated with subjugated colonial subjects. As a result, even as these Jewish populations acculturated to French social and cultural norms, their Frenchness was tied in with a corporate sense of themselves as Jews that was lacking in the Metropole.
Chapter two, “Arab, Jew, Arab Jew” interweaves the post-World War II history of French policies and attitudes toward its Jewish and Muslim Arab populations with the evolution of identity politics among French Jews. In a cultural and political landscape in which Jews have been largely recast as “insiders” while Muslims, by contrast, have become its quintessential “outsiders,” most Sephardim, rather than emphasizing their heritage as “Arab Jews,” have linked themselves politically to European Ashkenazim. At the same time, however, these Sephardim tend to have a much stronger sense of communal cohesion than their Ashkenazi counterparts. This has led both Jewish elites as well as many Sephardi adults in contemporary France to understand Jewishness as “a distinct cultural and political position” (98) while at the same time insisting that Jews are meaningfully tied to the French nation in a way that Muslim Arabs are not.
Chapter three, “Four cubits of Jewish schooling” explores the reasons why day school students (as distinct from Sephardi adults, for whom multiple identities are often in tension) tend to reify “Arabness,” “Frenchness” and “Jewishness” into hermeneutically sealed identity categories. A long school day makes socializing with friends outside school a near impossibility, while a fortress-like physical environment has created exaggerated fear of antisemitic attacks. The homogeneity of the day school population has also contributed to this phenomenon. Whereas all but the most religious Algerian and Ashkenazi Jews send their children to public schools, day school students are drawn almost exclusively from the more ethnically cohesive, socially isolated Moroccan and Tunisian immigrant communities. Furthermore, while Jewish schools are state-funded and, like their Catholic counterparts, are subject to government inspection, officials have turned a blind eye to the tendency of these institutions—in contradiction to Republican ideology—to encourage a communitarian, chauvinistic brand of ethno-religious identity. If this is due in part to the legacy of French state involvement in the persecution of Jews during World War II, it is also a function of the almost exclusive focus in contemporary France on Arab Muslim difference as a threat to French Republican values and social cohesion.
Chapter four, “Religion to Race,” explores how a combination of social, cultural, and intellectual influences within the day schools worked together to transform Jewishness from “a religious mode of identity construction rooted in the everyday work of following God's law… into a set of fixed, primordially given identity traits” (136). Teachers in secular history classes often presented identity in naturalized terms, while religion classes were mostly reduced to imparting rules that students were left to “integrate and understand through already-existing ideological frameworks.” (150). This confluence inadvertently encouraged school students to reify Jewishness and understand it in primordial terms that are in fact contrary to Jewish religious doctrine. Many argued, for example, that conversion either into or out of Judaism is impossible, and that anyone with Jewish ancestry must necessarily be categorized as Jewish.
In chapter five, “Domesticating Diaspora,” Arkin looks to the ways in which day schoolers projected this kind of primordialized sense of Jewish identity onto “an imagined Jewish community instantiated through Israel” and, in so doing, found it difficult to imagine a future for themselves in France. Following her argument in chapter four, Arkin contends that these kinds of ideas had little to do with explicit school ideology and much more to do with “the way Jewishness itself was imagined and lived within day schools” (164). The two main schools that Arkin worked in differed somewhat in their ideological orientations: whereas the more mainstream “Brith Abraham” was openly Zionist, the Lubavitch run Beit Sarah officially discouraged political identification with Israel in favor of religious imagery that, nonetheless, tended to “collapse” ancient and modern Israel. Both schools turned out students “who understood Jewishness as Israeliness” (203) and, in turn, imagined their future in Israel rather than in France.
The sixth and final chapter of Arkin's book focuses on how day schoolers have developed a kind of secular Jewish uniform, referred to as chalalah, both to be immediately recognizable to each other and to distinguish themselves from Muslim Arabs. Ironically, anxiety about being confused with Muslim Arabs stems from the actual cultural and physiognomic proximity of these populations. Jewish and Muslim immigrants from North Africa often live in the same neighborhoods, eat the same foods, and share numerous cultural traditions and physical traits. In a political and social landscape in which Muslim Arab youth are often read as “problematic” and associated with “social danger,” young Jews are especially eager to avoid being confused with this stigmatized population. While altercations between Jewish and Muslim youth are almost always indexed as “antisemitism,” in fact many of these confrontations, Arkin argues persuasively, can be more aptly categorized as interethnic turf wars between groups of adolescents.
Arkin's book masterfully uses a wide variety of theoretical frameworks to make sense of French day school identity politics, and she artfully fleshes out her anthropological study with extensive use of primary source material from the Jewish press, intellectuals, communal institutions and government reports. Rhinestones, Religion and the Republic should be of interest not only to historians and anthropologists interested in Jews and Muslims in France, but to scholars interested in the construction of minority identities in the modern world more broadly.
