Those Who Forget the Past (28 page)

“Out there” is, in fact, ten Métro stops from the Place de la Concorde. It is a territory of class identification, behind a Maginot Line of French snobbism and disconnection, a Gallic sense of the insider and the other. It contains towns that are full of memories of France's Vichy years—Drancy, where Simone de Beauvoir pushed food parcels through a barbed-wire fence to friends being deported to Auschwitz; Les Lilas, with its wedding-cake Hôtel de Ville, where Free French forces celebrated the Liberation.

NEWS TRAVELS FAST in the banlieues. All that autumn and into the winter of 2001 and the following year, the attacks intensified, linked in severity to the politics of the Middle East. In Le Blanc–Mesnil, Ghozlan was getting nowhere with the French police. He distributed his S.O.S. forms in schools, community centers, and synagogues, and installed another telephone line at home. On the weekends, volunteers from his synagogue and his daughters—one of them a lawyer who handles Arab divorce cases—helped him. He became increasingly harried. He had calls to make to the authorities, E-mails to send. The pages in his white notebook grew—stones thrown through windows, fires set in schools, boys wearing yarmulkes attacked at Métro stops. Several times a week he would leave his house in his gray Renault and drive the roads he had been traveling for years to the police headquarters of Seine–Saint-Denis. The small houses along the way were neatly appointed, with assists from the Republic, their decent façades disguising the lack of jobs within. He went to see the chief of police and began to hear such new euphemisms as
les desperados de cage d'escalier
(desperadoes of the stairwell) along with the traditional term
les voyous
(vandals). “Sauvageons,” in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's sense of noble savages, had become a politically correct term for Arabs, along with “les jeunes” (the young).

“Look, Sammy,” the chief told him, “they are doing the same things to the cops that they do to the Jews. They throw washing machines down from their apartments at police cars. They run into us.” “I understood it,” Ghozlan later told me. “They worried about appearing heavy-handed. There was a fear that they would be called thugs and Nazis. Several of my friends mentioned to me that they were afraid of creating a situation like in Los Angeles—another Watts.”

That February, in Sarcelles, flaming objects were thrown into the Tiferet Israel School, destroying the building. In April, at Garges-les-Gonesse, firebombs were hurled at the synagogue. From Nice to Marseille, anti-Semitic mail was delivered. In the offices of CRIF, located in the Fifth Arrondissement several blocks from the popular food market on the Rue Mouffetard, an envelope arrived filled with white powder and a message: “The biological war against the Jewish lobby has begun.”

IN LONDON in December 2001, in a now famous conversation at the publisher Conrad Black's, the French ambassador, Daniel Bernard, called Israel “that shitty little country” and refused later to apologize. Then, in Paris, a Hanukkah screening of a
Harry Potter
movie reserved by the Jewish National Fund was canceled by the theater because of fears of Muslim violence. Very few of these episodes were reported in the mainstream press, but E-mails bombarded the office of Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, in New York. Foxman had long understood the delicacy of navigating within the French establishment. With a budget of $50 million, the ADL, headquartered in an eleven-story building across from the United Nations, has resources and a network of intelligence operatives that are inconceivable to most French Jewish officials. A little-known fact about French Jews is how underfunded their organizations are. Each year the Rothschild family contributes a significant amount of money to fund a myriad of budget requests—security guards, employees, operating expenses—to protect the Jews of France.

“What we are talking about here is the need to understand that Jewish France has been traditionally controlled by the Hofjuden, the Jews of the court,” Shimon Samuels said to me the day we met. Samuels is an expert on the subject. He arrived in Paris from Jerusalem in 1980 and in 1988 set up an office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the organization responsible for tracking down many former Nazis. Trained in London and Jerusalem as a political scientist, Samuels was convinced that the new rise of Muslim fundamentalism had become a graver concern to the world than the capture and prosecution of octogenarians. He had the overview of a professor and used German words to describe the oddity of the French Jewish social structure. As the head of the Paris office of the Wiesenthal Center, he monitored potential terrorist and anti-Semitic activity throughout the world.

GETTING IN COMMUNICATION with Samuels is a daunting task. His E-mail cannot be accessed in many of the strange places he travels, and his cell-phone message system is often overloaded or impenetrable. E-mails I sent him bounced back to me, and I got used to phones that didn't ring and recordings that explained that Mr. Samuels was unable to receive messages. Much of his year is spent in zones of possible terrorist activity; he can “get by” in twelve languages. Rarely in Paris, he is a man in airplanes or at conferences in Third World countries. In Durban, where he participated in the U.N. World Conference Against Racism in 2001, he was expelled from the room. Later he witnessed demonstrators marching to a synagogue screaming, “Hitler should have finished the job!” It is his occupation to monitor the hate surging up in Islamic-fundamentalist quarters. A tireless lobbyist, he has an ability to forge political compromises. With me, the phrase he used to describe French indifference concerning what was happening in their country was “the black box of denial,” and he spoke of “the many-headed hydra” behind the attacks. He often sounded harried and snappish, the stern and rumpled professor who had no time for lengthy explanations. He understood that, for the establishment Jews of France, religion was secondary to their Frenchness. They maintained their status by being Hofjuden, skilled at
shah shtil,
the ability to whisper into the ear of the king.

Samuels is British and spent his early years in Warwickshire, in the English countryside, with a family that sent him to Sunday school. Coming home one afternoon, he and his cousin were attacked by local boys, who stoned them and tied them to a cross in a field. “Incredibly, I wiped the event from my mind, as if it didn't happen,” he told me. Immediately after that, he rejoined his parents in London. Years later he visited his grandparents' grave, only to find that it had been desecrated. When he called the burial society to complain, he was told, “A storm destroyed it.” “The storm stopped on the Jewish side of the cemetery?” he demanded. “Suddenly what happened to me as a child came back in excruciating detail,” he said, “and I understood for the first time in my life why I do what I do.”

SAMUELS DID NOT look forward to attending the CRIF annual dinner. CRIF always invited the prime minister and his Cabinet, and several hundred people attended the formal evening. For Samuels, the dinner was everything he disliked about working in France. A few months after his arrival in 1980, a bomb had been exploded outside the Rue Copernic synagogue in Paris. Four people walking in the neighborhood were killed. “Two innocent French persons were killed,” the then prime minister, Raymond Barre, had remarked. He was widely criticized for the implication that Jewish victims were an altogether different species from the French. Before setting up the Wiesenthal office in Paris, Samuels had worked as the deputy director of a strategic political-science institute in Israel. By the end of the 1970s, he had begun to have a strong sense of the rise of terrorism in Islamic-fundamentalist sects.

In the winter of 2001, Samuels was having to navigate his own complex relationships within the French Jewish establishment, which was not ready to share fully his alarm at the attacks on Jews in the banlieues. Their focus was still on the traditional, Vichy model of historical right-wing anti-Semitism, and their concern centered on Jean-Marie Le Pen, who appeared to them to be a resurrection of the old hatreds. In 2002 he would pull roughly 20 percent of the national vote in the first round of the presidential election.

For Samuels, the differences between the old and new forms of anti-Semitism manifested themselves when he pressed the case for reparations for French victims of the Holocaust. “Jews should not be about money,” a leader of a prominent Jewish organization told him. “It reinforces a negative stereotype.” Samuels was told he was
un traître,
a traitor, and berated for his American pushiness in trying to collect restitution for victims. In the late nineties, Samuels assisted a team of New York lawyers pursuing a class-action lawsuit against French banks for hundreds of victims. The case had further established Samuels as a scrappy outsider,
trop américain,
in certain powerful circles. On the subject of the CRIF dinner, he was not hesitant about voicing his opinion. “The Jewish community should set itself as an objective that they do not need a dinner with the prime minister,” he told me. “It sets in motion a set of political mortgages, where the prime minister has to give an accounting. And the Jews, like in medieval times, come to the court with their pleas. It is humiliating . . . an event in which the community is put into the position of having to be a supplicant.”

ALL THESE REASONS and more drew Shimon Samuels to Sammy Ghozlan. Samuels knew Ghozlan by reputation; he had been recruited during François Mitterrand's administration to help investigate the 1982 bombing at Jo Goldenberg's, a famous Jewish restaurant in the Marais district of Paris, and he had been the subject of a lengthy article in
Le Matin
magazine. The film director Alexandre Arcady had used the character of a Sephardic cop named Sammy in a Nazi-art-caper movie called K, based on a detective novel, but Samuels had never seen it or heard of the book. He knew of Ghozlan mainly through the flyers for his “grand orchestre de variétés” and the cards distributed at Bar Mitzvahs which showed Sammy posed behind drums in a tuxedo with his band, with “Groove, Funck, Hassidiques, Israélien . . . Oriental” written in bold yellow letters at the top. When the two men met at the CRIF dinner, Samuels mentioned his midlife attempt to learn to play the clarinet. “Ghozlan reminded me of a Pancho Villa type, very uncharacteristic of French Jews,” Samuels later said. “He had no pretense of being an intellectual.” Ghozlan told Samuels he had been incensed that the Jewish leadership had fought him when he took on the claimants' case against French banks. Samuels understood immediately that Ghozlan could be a useful ally. “He had come with the police background and was trying to do—with no real help!—exactly what we were doing, analyze documents, work his sources. . . . I thought the Jewish organizations had missed out on an effective intelligence operation in the banlieues.” It would take months, however, for Samuels, forever circling the globe, to be able to forge an official relationship with the cop from the suburbs.

By the winter of 2001, the situation had become untenable. The attack on the World Trade Center appeared to set off a fresh wave of violence. More and more, in the late afternoon, Monique Ghozlan would find her husband at the
consistoire,
which regulated synagogues and all aspects of Jewish life, giving interns and volunteers recommendations on how to take calls from attack victims.

Monique and Sammy live in a stone house behind a hedge, within walking distance of their small synagogue. The house is decorated with a collection of North African silver they brought from Algeria and family portraits, including one of Sammy's grandfather, who was once the chief rabbi of Algeria. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Ghozlans were orchardists who had large properties in the country. Monique, whom Sammy met when he was in the Boy Scouts, has pineapple-blond hair and a perpetual tan. The daughter of a bar owner and the mother of three grown daughters and one son, she resembles the actress Dyan Cannon, with hair that cascades to her shoulders. As Sammy worked the phones in the late afternoon, Monique, home from her job teaching first grade, would cook couscous, fava beans, and fish—traditional Sephardic foods.

The Sephardim have a hermetic culture with entirely different rituals from those of Ashkenazi Jews. Considered by many to be more religious than their Eastern European counterparts, France's Sephardim never experienced massive pogroms or, for that matter, Europe's secular enlightenment; Spinoza was Sephardic, but there was no Sephardic Freud or Marx. Revered as “the muscle Jews” by the early Zionist leader Theodor Herzl, the Sephardim were thought to be free of the victim complexes of Eastern Europeans. “We are not always as educated, and we like to drink and have big parties, but we are not depressives,” Sammy told me. In the small
shul
s on the outskirts, there is chaos during the service, with children running from family to family and men gossiping through the chanting of the Torah as if they were conducting business in a bazaar. Sephardic families are often large, and first cousins are permitted to marry. Since the Algerian war drove them to France in the 1960s, Sephardim can now be found at every level of education and accomplishment in French society—Nobel laureates, government ministers, distinguished intellectuals—and many of them have intermarried with Ashkenazi Jews. According to a recent survey, 70 percent of the Jews in France are Sephardic.

STILL, IT DID NOT take much to make Ghozlan see himself as an outsider, misunderstood by the French elite. He had a title, security adviser, which sounded impressive, but he had no office and no private phone. A special green telephone had been installed at the
consistoire,
and all calls received by volunteers were reported to Ghozlan. “I tried to bring the techniques of simple police interrogation,” he said. “Ask the name, the address, the phone number, the place of the attack.” He was often understandably frustrated. The idea that by the winter of 2001 this jerry-built detective agency was monitoring more than 200 incidents throughout France was shocking to Ghozlan. A rabbi had been beaten up, urine had been thrown at Jewish students on a playground, and fires had been set, yet few of the incidents were reported immediately to the police. It was detective work at its most primitive, on scraps of paper. Failure was unthinkable to Ghozlan, however, and he knew how to deal with the French bureaucracy. But lobbying through ethnic organizations was frowned upon in France and was considered an act with vulgar American overtones. The officials of many Jewish organizations were averse to such aggressive tactics.