The millions of Jews that were exterminated by the Nazis in the plains of Poland had some common features that allow one to speak of a European Judaism. It was not so much about being part of some mythical people, nor about religion for they were many to have drifted away from it : it was about elements of a common culture. It could neither be reduced to cooking recipes, nor jokes conveying the well-known Jewish humor, nor even language since not all of them spoke Yiddish. It was something deeper, under various forms shared by the textile workers of Lodz and the diamond polishers of Anvers, from the talmudists of Vilna to the vegetable sellers of Odessa and up to certain families of bankers as the one of Aby Warburg. These people were not better than others, but they had never exercised any state sovereignty and their living conditions were offering no other way out than money and studies. In any case they despised the brute force which they often had to suffer from. They were numerous to chose the side of the oppressed and to participate in the resistance movement of the first half of the last century : it is this culture that fed the Jewish Workers movement, from the Polish Bund, spearhead of the 1905 and 1917 revolutions in the Czarist empire, to the Parisian furriers and helmet crafters unions whose flags bore mottoes in Yiddish and that gave a lot of fighters in the MOI [1], against the Nazi occupant. It is on that ground that the emblematic figures of the European Judaism grew up, Rosa Luxembourg, Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein. After the war, lots of survivors and their children would support emancipation struggles in the world, the black Americans, the ANC in South Africa, the Algerians in their liberation war.

These people are dead and will not be resurrected. But what is happening now in Gaza is killing them a second time. One will say that there is no need of getting upset, that there were many precedents, from Deir Yassin to Sabra and Chatilla. I think, on the contrary, that the entry of the Israeli army in the ghetto of Gaza marks a fatal turn. First by the degree of brutality, the number of children burnt dead or buried under the debris of their house : a line has been crossed, it has to bring and will bring one day the Israeli Prime minister, the minister of Defense and the chief of Staff in front of the International Court of Justice.

But the turn is not only that of horror and massacre of masses of Palestinians. There are two points which make the actual events the worst thing that has happened to the Jews since Auschwitz. The first is the cynicism, the blatant way to treat Palestinians as if they were subhumans, the leaflets dropped by planes announcing more deadly bombings when the population of Gaza has nowhere to flee, all issues blocked, and nothing left to do but wait for death in the dark. This type of prank is ghastly reminiscent of the way Jews in eastern Europe used to be treated during the war, and on that point I am firmly waiting for the outraged cries of the good sold-out souls. The other novelty is the silence of the majority of the Jews. In Israel, in spite of a handful of irreducible braves, the mass demonstration are lead by Palestinians. In France, the demonstrations of the 3rd and 10th of January saw the proletariat of the poor neighborhoods march the streets, but I did not hear enough angry shouts of Jewish intellectuals, unionists or Jewish politicians. Instead of being satisfied with the nonsense of the government or the CRIF [2] ("not to bring the conflict home"), now it is time for the Jews to march in number along the "arab-muslims" in the protests against the unacceptable. Otherwise their children will ask them one day "what they were doing at that time" and I would not like to be in their place when they will have to answer.

Eric Hazan

[1] Main d’œuvre Immigrée, organization funded by the French Communist Party in the 1920s

[2] Conseil Representatif des Institutions Juives de France

(Trad. Yann Lecrivain with the help of M. Moreau)