I spent twenty years of my life in a country whose official ideology, when confronted with any human problem, was always to reduce it to a political phenomenon. (This ideological passion for the reduction of man is the evil that those coming from "back there" have learned to despise the most.) -Milan Kundera

Since the tragedy of Hitler, political anti-Semitism has all but disappeared from the face of the earth. Not, of course, that any magic spell suddenly stopped people from hating Jews. But the ill will remains in an unfocused state. Prejudice doesn't claim to be a worldview. What's needed for it to reach the next level? Fear. The Nazis feared the Jews. So did Drumont and Dostoyevsky. Fear made Jews Seem organized and ubiquitous, and in possession of extraordinary powers. For these political minds, Jews were not just foreigners with suspicious customs, but a superior adversary to be fought with- out mercy. "It is impossible to exaggerate the formidable stature of the Jew as enemy" (Hitler).

The Jews then offered a demonstration of their powerlessness that lasted five years. You can still hate them, avoid contact with them or distrust their chicanery. But there's no longer any way to accord them the dignity of evil conspirators, seeking to seize control of the world for themselves. You can't kill the devil; if you do, it's no longer the devil.

Even so, racist ideology couldn't keep its hands off the wreckage of Nazism. Universally rejected in public, it now shows its face only in private, with a violence that's frightening nonetheless. We've become used to this dichotomy: while politicians speak the language of justice and equality, it's left to individuals to express their brutal antipathies or racial prejudice. You can count on it: many racists wouldn't like it a bit if their ministers and representatives began making public use of the words they use in private. They'd be sincerely shocked by this sudden breach of decorum in political discourse, the intrusion of a violence and contempt that had no business there. It's as if the postwar period had decreed a divorce between politics and racism, and that modern morality works within each of us to make sure we respect this compulsory split.

As a result, hostility against the Jews can no longer be turned to political advantage. The name Jew itself gets in the way, designating them as an ethnic group that has suffered. That's why the word Zionism has become so important. Zionists need not be considered as members of a nation or race, but as partisan advocates of a system. The historical past doesn't prevent us from criticizing the harm that system has done, from exaggerating the power of its leaders, or keep us from ac- cording them the grand stature of mysterious, omnipotent characters who manipulate public opinion and determine the course of world events. Ideological anti-Semitism would hardly be able to flourish without christening itself anew, which it did, for the substitution of Zionist for Jew is more than just a rhetorical device. What it reveals is the mutation that totalitarian thought has undergone. In our era, we persecute ideologies, not whole peoples: there are no more sub-human species, just the henchmen of imperialism, fascists hiding behind the shield of the blue star of David, militants, and in the last analysis, "a new kind of Nazism." ' In short, racism can only be mentioned in contemporary political discourse under the sign of its opposite.

"ZIONIST!" GENEALOGY OF AN ACCUSATION

It was in the Paris of 1895 that Theodor Herzl conceived the idea of a Jewish state. "In his capacity as a correspondent, he had witnessed the public degradation of Alfred Dreyfus, and had seen the epaulets tom from this man who cried out: 'I'm innocent.' It was at that same moment that he became convinced in the depths of his soul that Dreyfus was innocent, and that he was only subject to this abominable suspicion be- cause he was Jewish."2. For Herzl, the Dreyfus Affair was proof that the entire assimilationist experience was in vain. The power of Reason was not up to the task of vanquishing anti-Semitism, that scourge of backward nations and ineradicable affliction of the most civilized. Jews would finally be left in peace only when they were at home in a land of their own. Was the solution a dream? Far less a dream, Herzl thought, than the unfulfilled hope of gaining full acceptance as citizens of other nations. The territorial idea, at least, was more than a dream, it was a utopia in the literal sense: a place for the Jews. Once people got over their astonished disbelief, the geo- graphical solution was sure to please all sides. The Jews would gain security and respect, while the Others would be relieved of the intolerable presence of this foreign body. "They'll have to find us a bit of land on the surface of the globe: an international ghetto. ...They can't throw all of us into the water, or at least can't bum us all alive."3

There were the two sides of Zionism: the lofty ideal of a Jewish state, and the willing agreement to become a world ghetto. The homeland Herzl hoped for was to be a land of spectacular progress, granting a millenial nation all the political prerogatives of modernity. But it was at the same time a kind of throwback, once again offering the Jews a life apart. Pride and disenchantment: Herzl flattered himself that this dual sentiment gave him a privileged lucidity that other theorists lacked. He saw the gentiles for what they were, instead of judging them by the ideals they professed.

All for naught! Anti-Semites would not be moved by this bitter realism, and the founding father would be given no credit for his hope of assembling the Jews in a particular place. The best example was the appearance at the turn of this century of the famous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, those apocryphal lectures in which a member of the secret Jewish government is supposed to have laid bare plans for seizing world control. The first editors of the text had designated the Alliance Israelite Universelle as the headquarters of this Free- masonry. Several years later (1905), the headquarters of Zion is moved, and it is in Bale, they assure us, in the halls of the First World Zionist Congress that the shady meeting of the Exilarques took place. From its very advent, or almost, the word Zionist would move beyond the control of its proponents and follow two divergent and separate courses, one in the Jewish community and the other in anti-Semitic discourse. What for Herzl and his people signified desire for a land and a state would be immediately interpreted by the other side as a conspiracy on a planetary scale, "which has the task of uniting all the Jews in the whole world in one union -a union which is more closely knit and more dangerous than the Jesuits."4 Separatism is inverted into a tentacular plot; the initiative that should have, by all logic, shattered anti- Jewish propaganda instead feeds it and makes it more intense.

The Nazis would put this delirium to powerful effect. No hypocrites they, ferocity would become their philosophy. At once anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist, they would castigate Jews for a life that consisted of nothing but vampiristically preying on other nations, and Zionists -those generic enemies of the State- for plotting the world's demise. A parasitic people can produce nothing but a politics of destruction. Barrès was already calmly declaring: "I conclude by his race that Dreyfus is capable of treason." In similar fashion, Hitler's metaphysics sees the Zionist conspiracy as springing from the Jewish instinct and going on to become its end result and perfect expression. As super-Jewish Jews, if I can dare to use such an expression, Zionists were pure products of their ethnic back- ground (of their "species," as fascist terminology would put it), the most accomplished of Shem's children. Superior skill enabled them to conceal their voracious imperialism behind the harmless front seeking a state (Ha! a state on that arid, malaria infested land!).

Today, such logic persists only in an attenuated, residual form. The last world war shattered the causal link between the fated character of the Jewish people, the will to conquest and the subversion attributed to Zionism. The argument that every Jew must be a Zionist is now rarely heard, for the con- science of nations and the rhetoric of states today sees Hitler- ism as the incarnation of evil. The people's republics and Arab countries condemn Israel's actions and the exorbitant power of its supporters, but without claiming them to be biological facts. Zionism can no longer be explained as an inexorable consequence of genetic law. It's become an independent entity, simultaneously an effect and its cause, a fault as well as its explanation, self-sustaining and powerful in itself. Though the expression "international Judaism" may crop up from time to time in some publication or other, there's no need to cry out at this telling lapse. It's now no more than what we call "a slip" in the midst of otherwise well-policed language: a reprehensible word, whose fault rests solely with the zealous individual who wrote or spoke it, not with the untarnished cause it is supposed to serve.

The postfascist age no longer thinks in terms of evil races or natural subversives, only of vile rhetoric and bad behavior; we fight against practices, not against nations, as we did in the savage outbreaks that marked this century's first halt: As such, this might be considered moral progress when all is said and done: isn't it a comforting sight to see humanity linking arms in the fight for the power off act and standing up for biological phantoms of old? Shouldn't such political independence be applauded?

And a specious maturity it is. New-Look anti- Zionists vehemently deny any part of the Hitlerian legacy, while their black lyricism describes them as besieged by Zionists with a talent that would have made Rosenberg proud, the court philosopher of the Reich. The Enemy is still that thing of darkness, the political dracula who flees the light of day.

Whether he resides in the Third World or sits on some board of directors, whether he prefers banks and their comfortable surroundings or the tougher world of espionage, whether he's the gray eminence as chief of state or a media mogul, the Zionist is the man who works in the shadows cutting his underhanded deals. His objectives: it would be naive to assume they concerned the Jewish state alone. Israel is merely a piece of the puzzle, the first step in a strategy of world domination that Zionism and imperialism jointly undertake.

Who can say where its border lie? Who will decide whether a Jew is innocent or part of the invisible empire, and by what criteria? What fraction of the people of Moses are loyal enough, pure enough to escape the suspicion of being Zionist? Especially when the image of the Zionist in the eyes of his detractors makes him a kind of infiltrating presence, with no fixed address or consistent rhetoric. You can't just look under "conspirators" in the Yellow Pages. Anti-Zionism is one of those frightening ideologies that rob their victims of the power to prove themselves innocent: the crime takes on an irrefutable existence as soon as someone is charged. The judge is all-powerful, capable of turning even the strongest argument for innocence into a crushing indictment. "You've never ex- pressed openly Zionist opinions? That's because Zionism is a secretive undertaking, and you needed a cover." The court thus decides who is a Jew and who is a Zionist according to criteria available to it alone. If circumstances demand it, the condemnation can be extended to cover the whole range of Israelites, granting no one the status of attenuated Jewishness. Thus, without the least allusion to racism, all Jews find them- selves guilty.

And it's much easier today than before the war to describe Zionism in the broadest possible terms. Until 1948, visionary exponents of the Jewish state were a minority within their communities. As we've seen, Bundists, communists, the religious and liberals alike all subjected them to merciless attacks. Those were the lean years, when anti-Semites had to use every sophistic talent at their disposal to prove that differences in the Jewish community were illusory, and that their quarrels were really a ploy to hoodwink the world. Anti-Zionists no longer need to perform such sleights of hand to make their case. Today, most Jews show some concern for the state of Israel. The feeling comes in many forms, and is expressed in an infinite number of ways: activism, financial support, emotional solidarity, a special curiosity about the news from Jerusalem. All that's required to transform the entire community into a secret society or a Cosa Nostra is to subsume all these differences under a single name: Zionism.

There is no more satisfying theory than a conspiracy theory. No sooner has it been adopted than all obstacles vanish, and the reality principle, that spoilsport, draws its last breath. It's the discourse that never fails: to believe in a conspiracy is to find shelter from reality. "The evidence is against me? I can't prove what I claim? If I could, it would only be a sign of weak - ness in my invincible enemy. In other words, who's tampering with the evidence? Who whips public opinion into a fury? Who distorts events? Who if not exactly that slippery octopus I so anxiously and untiringly denounce?" Such is the seduction of conspiracy: by turning every counter argument into additional evidence for its case, it offers its faithful a perfect, adamantine, unsubvertible system.

Zionist: the usefulness of the term couldn't escape Stalin, that grand master of the language of persecution. Let's give credit where credit is due: it was the contribution of this little leader of men to have launched the first anti- Zionist campaign of the post- Holocaust era. Of course, it didn't go off without a few glitches. At first, top billing in the Stalinist lexicon was given to the term cosmopolitanism. By evoking the down side of internationalism, the term was a useful way of charging people with an unprovable offense, and for depriving Jews of even the use of their name. Was he Jewish, Salomon Mikhoels, beaten to death in the streets of Minsk by agents of the Soviet police, April 13, 1948? Were they Jewish, the four hundred odd writers and artists who were liquidated as the fifties began? Were they Jewish, those Yiddish publications that were brutally banned, or the schools of Vilna and Kovo closed by the authorities? These claims were nothing but slander. Mod- em totalitarianism has nothing to do with oppressing the Jews; these were people and institutions punished for the crime of being cosmopolitan, not for their religion.

But the system had a flaw: the disparity between the flimsiness of the charges and the violence of the repression was simply too great. Cosmopolitans were surely deviants, as parasites and as exiles. But working for whom? The word evokes a kind of treason, not a conspiracy; it isn't quite enough to justify persecution. Zionism would be the term that would cover this slight deficit in the moral account. Thanks to close relations between Israel and the United States, from now on the domestic enemy would no longer be an assortment of shady individuals but a highly organized and active coalition. The cosmopolitan was a suspect; the Zionist was guilty as charged. The cosmopolitan loved neither his country nor socialism: the Zionist was a member of a secret organization that worked night and day to subvert them. It was a label worthy of the kind of purge Stalin had in mind. In the name of anti- Zion- ism, all was permitted. The Doctor's Plot in Moscow. The Slansky trial in Prague. Ten doctors wanting to kill the good Georgian; fifteen dignitaries of the Czech Communist Party as suspected CIA agents. Everything was possible once the concept of Zionism was put into play.

Today's anti-Zionism has no original material: everything is a refinement on Comrade Stalin's brilliant innovations. No more scapegoats are required, just political enemies; no need

for a cultural enemy, just the division of the world into rival camps; no more Jews, just Zionists, those fomenters of both a noxious ideology and unsettling conspiracy. Stalin can be proud of his children: thirty years of research and effort have brought the Zionist conspiracy from the era of piecework into the industrial mode of production. By using the most vehement diatribes available today, anti- Zionism has almost erased the distinction between the puppet and puppetmaster pulling the strings: maybe the Zionists are directing U .S. imperial- ism, maybe the Pentagon has already fallen into their hands. As for the ideology itself, we remember the famous UN resolution that, on November 10, 1975, defined Zionism as a form of racism. Anti-Zionism thus struck a double blow: it gained international recognition, hitting the mark by projecting its own fault onto the prey it attacked. The condemnation of the Jews for racism was Stalin's greatest posthumous success, an unbelievable joke, with modern totalitarianism unable to contain its laughter .7

And the same analysis holds for the Arab countries as well. It's certainly true that they aren't part of the common Judeo- phobic tradition kept alive by Russia and Poland, and that they don't have genocide on their conscience as Europe does. But it's also the case that they have reasons of their own to resist the Israeli presence. Every historical instance of settling a new population on already occupied territory has brought problems in its wake. In choosing nevertheless to call their adversaries the "Zionist entity," these states have turned the Arab-Israeli conflict into an avatar of the Jewish Question. The concept of Zionism cancels all nuances, suppresses distinctions and abolishes differences of degree: it conceives of an opponent comprised of civilians and soldiers, sympathizers and activists, the Diaspora and the state of Israel. Every Jew, wherever he lives and whatever he does, can appear as an enemy. The Israeli out of uniform and the most peace-loving Israelite discover themselves to be unwitting soldiers of a gigantic secret army, through a doctrine that places the entire Jewish people under the double banner of Israeli expansion- ism and world reaction.

Anti- Zionism wages its war only against combatants. It's a nice idea, but with one slight problem: the anti-Zionist world- view has no room for noncombatants. What good does it do, on the one hand, to politicize the issues, if on the other you re- fuse to place any bounds on the political sphere? What good does it do to delimit your enemy (the Zionist, and no one else) and the grounds for your hostility (imperialism, colonialism), when elsewhere you paint the crime of Zionism with such broad strokes that practically any Jew is guilty as charged? Such generalized hatred gives every appearance of being a limited form of opposition. Terrorism is a direct consequence of this distortion. If there are no longer any innocents, only a "Zionist entity," any random attack will always be a direct hit, and the most aleatory violence is already justified.

The Left, at least a certain Left, is repelled by the thought that there might be Arab anti-Semitism. Anyone who ventures this hypothesis is immediately accused of defamation. Three arguments, always the same, are cited as proof; since the Arabs are Semites themselves, how can they be accused of anti-Semitism? Before the disastrous creation of Israel, relations between Islam and the Jewish communities living at its heart had always been excellent. The Jewish state, finally, would never have been born if the war hadn't made the West feel the need to compensate its victims: Europe salved its guilty conscience by committing a new injustice, this time against the Arabs. This three-pronged argument deserves further examination, if only for the favor it finds among progressives of all countries, and for the wonderful and promising ideological future it holds.

You don't saw off the branch you're sitting on: Semites can't be anti-Semitic. A superb syllogism, but one that doesn't take this into account: anti-Semitism is a recent word. In- vented around 18 50 by a certain Wilhelm Marr, the term has never had any other purpose than dressing up anti -Jewish sentiment as a field of scholarly research in the Humanities, as something crucial in the struggle for survival. It is Jews and no one else who continue to be hated. Rebaptized as Semites, they're no longer a religion but transformed into a race. The change signaled the passage from inquisition to an all-out war. Properly speaking, Western anti-Semitism thus has no more existence than does Arab anti-Semitism: what appears to be anti-Semitism is never anything but the scientifically certified ethnocidal variant that is anti- Jewish prejudice.

As for relations between Moslems and Jews, they were less idyllic than the picture that kindhearted propaganda would like to paint. The Jews were "dhimmis," a protectorate of Islam. As such, they had to pay a special tax and lavish tokens of respect and deference on the True Believers. From this arose the necessity of everything from wearing a distinctive symbol to a ban on building houses that were taller than a Moslem's, or on touching a Moslem woman. To be sure, the Jews enjoyed a relative security that their European coreligionists might have envied. There was never any attempt to force them to accept the Islamic faith, and they were never deported (be- fore the creation of Israel) from any Arab country. They were nevertheless subject to a persecution that ranged from individual humiliation to pogroms. To those nostalgic for a would-be Judeo-Arabic golden age, Albert Memmi usefully recalls the most recent examples: 1907: massacre in ca- sablanca; 1912: the great massacre in Fez; 1936: the massacre of Constantine, 24 dead, scores of seriously wounded; 1945: massacre in Tripoli, and more.8

An essential distinction remains, however, between European anti-Semitism and the contempt in which Islam traditionally held the people of the Book. Eastern Jews were considered a weak minority, and Moslem polemics held this political inferiority to be proof of religious inferiority. While Christianity and later the secular West believed in the myth of Jewish power, Islam took the opposite course and chose to emphasize Jewish poverty and impotence. Mohammed had brought forth Islam: the miracle attested to its divine mission. In short, it is not anti-Judaism as such that has been characteristic of the West up into the present, but rather the exterminatory wish behind anti-Jewish feeling: a frightening, apocalyptic hatred that depicts the Jews as "so overwhelmingly powerful that the only way to cope with them is to destroy them utterly."9

It took the appearance of the Jewish state for Western anti- Semitic discourse to penetrate Islam. Israel, as they still say in most Arab countries, is an American enclave, a thorn, a wound, a festering scar on the body of the Arab (or Islamic) nation. But metaphors don't account for the full extent of Western influence. Anti-Semitism was brought to Arab soil disguised as antipathy toward Israel as a Western country. In violent attacks against Israeli usurpation, radical Arabs don't restrict themselves to the language of law. Denunciations of the worldwide Zionist conspiracy accompanies the legal claim for Palestinian territory. The mellahs swarming with a poor and humble populace are gone, and the hour of the Zionists - with their arrogant array of endless schemes-has come. The enemy is no longer the Daimei, an inferior subaltern whom one could treat, according to whim, with benevolence or disdain: he is now the collective incarnation of evil and conspires to ruin the human race. With this change in its image of the Jew, Islam has joined the ranks of European anti-Semitism. For its own tradition was literally impoverished in comparison with the arsenal of accusations which Marxist and Christian culture had in store. It's an ideology that travels well and is quickly learned, and to judge by several recent publications, the student has done his teacher proud. Who, after all, is the first postwar head of state to make himself a public apologist for the Protocols of the Elders ofZion? Nasser, the hero of Third Worldism. II This forgery, already extensively circulated since its promotion by czarist Russia, still has a lot of shelf life left: after the defection ("the betrayal") of Egypt, it continues to be a reference work in all the countries on the Rejectionist Front. Hatred of the West, whose current mainstay is Zionism, re- sounds with echoes strangely familiar to Western memory.

The pioneers of the back-to-Zion movement had but a single desire: to gather the Jews and put an end to two thousand years of scattering and exile. Their hope has certainly gone unfulfilled, all the more so in their inability to make themselves understood. Today, old fears of the Jewish Diaspora ironically return in the guise of anti-Zionism. In fact, what fosters this rhetoric and provides its apocalyptic hue is not the massing of the Jews in a single place, but its opposite: their dispersal to the four corners of the earth. The minuscule Jewish state is, in the eyes of its enemies, the agent of a colossal, clandestine organization, "the capital of an elusive and omnipresent empire" wrote Philippe de Saint- Robert in the pages of Le Monde. 12 The Jewish people make up, including Israel, an extensive but cohesive network of communities; anti-Zionism grounds its fundamental argument on this intolerable absurdity. What do these people scattered throughout the planet do? Hovering in the shadows, they connive to bring about the demise of the Good. What common bond brings them together across the babel of languages and disparate ways of life? Conspiracy, that unbreakable link. Diaspora = Mafia: the sinister notion of a Jewish plot was born of this equation, and the same image, unchanged in everything but vocabulary, provides the basis for contemporary anti -Zionism.

Maurras once made this shattering admission in confidence: "It all seems impossible or frightfully difficult, without the providence of anti-Semitism. Through it, everything works, becomes clear and simple. If you weren't an anti- Semite out of patriotism, you'd become one out of sheer opportunism." It's nice, in fact, to have an enemy who's both in- visible and all-powerful: it gives you a feeling of complete clarity and irresponsibility. Everything's the fault of the Other, the Grand Antagonist; there's nothing, absolutely nothing for which he can't answer, and you're exempt in advance from any further inquiry. Anti-Semitism guarantees the double pleasure of definitive clarity intellectually and perfect innocence morally. For those who wage war against him, the Zionist is a similar blessing: so demonical as a subterranean adversary, so widespread, so organized, so Diaspora that you can attribute any evil act to him without risking incoherence. When the Syrian army bombed the Palestinian camp of Tall-El-Zaatar into oblivion in 1976 the Franco-Palestinian Medical Association published, with complete self-assurance, the following declaration:

But the record-holder in this event seems to be the Islamic republic of the Imam Khomeni. There's no defeat, no failure, no difficulty, no opponent in which the leaders of the Iranian revolution haven't discovered a Zionist hand. If one were to believe the allegations of the new regime, Zionists probably control the wire services, must have been implicated in the Kurdish uprising, dictate the politics of the American Senate and were probably the poisoners of the Ayatollah Taleghani. Quite a bit for a single adversary, but far-flung and invisible Zionists are not just any enemy. With the Diaspora, you've got to be ready for anything. Zionists can turn up everywhere at once, in defiance of all logic: you've got to be on the lookout for that incomparable empress of evil, more wicked than America, Hitler and all the incarnations of Satan rolled up into one.

Emigres from the East Block have often made the ironic and bitter observation that dogma is mouthed only in those countries where it remains out of power. A petrified Marxism still claims its functionaries and victims in the peoples' republics, while liberal Europe is where its advocates and militant backers are to be found. No Western country considers Zion- ism to be a crime, but the word Zionist is sometimes used as an insult. What for the East is a criminal category is for us a living concept. The unique contribution of Western Marxism has been its revival of dead languages: a red cap has been placed atop the criminal code, and worn-out slogans refreshed with a new revolutionary fervor .

Many of us, in any case, have paid the price. As young Jews aching to belong to a people crowned by sorrow, we couldn't wait for someone to treat us like a "kike." We imagined how we'd respond, and looked forward to smashing him. But instead of a thug, a superpatriot or a little Nazi, we were confronted wherever we turned by would-be instructors and preening pros of good conscience, ready to give us a few tips. They held our racism but not our race against us, saw us as the tools of a theocratic, imperialist and militaristic state, and hated us for being colonizers and paras, not exiles or nomads. Having ceased to be a persecuted minority and become the arrogant oppressors, we were given but a single chance of reclaiming our previous image; produce our certificate of divorce from Israel. An inquisitorial atmosphere dominated progressive circles of the period. To be accepted as a Jew, all ties with Zionism had to be cut, just as in the past, liberal France conferred the status of Israelite on those of the Prophet's descendants who no longer retained the slightest trace of Jewishness. The position of the Jew had undergone a reversal, and the rules of the game had changed. What hadn't, to put it boldly, was the demand to come clean, the obligation to answer before the bar.

Whether Zionist or Jew, the revolution brooked no com- promise, complexity or partial gestures. It was well under- stood that we would be held responsible for the most minute trace of toleration toward Israel, and that demonstrating any concern for its survival would forever place us on the executioners' side. And this was the more indulgent position; hard- core militants had purged the word Jew from their vocabulary. All was political and everything had to be decided on the spot. Activists looked to history only for emblems or metaphors that might be useful in the present, entering it like a wardrobe and removing only the events and personages they could use. Let the petit bourgeois, the aesthetes and the idle burnish their memories and burden themselves with needless night- mares. Those who lived in a state of emergency had no time to waste keeping up monuments to the dead. Never look back, never count past two: these were the basic laws governing their behavior. Neither memory nor nuances could be allowed to get in action's way. Workers/bosses; socialism/barbarism; imperialism/Third World; Zionists/Palestinians: such structural oppositions magically opened the gates of the palace of wisdom. How could they be charged with anti-Semitism, when a world without Jews unfolded before their eyes?

This activism has lost much of its power to intimidate, but has become more radical among its few remaining practitioners. On March 27,1979, at lunchtime, a bomb exploded in front of the Israelite university restaurant on the Rue Medicis in Paris. The attack left twenty-six wounded, two seriously. Miraculously no one died. The police (is anyone surprised?) didn't find the perpetrators. What we know of their motives comes from the name they gave: "Autonomous collective of intervention against the Zionist presence in France and against the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty." A phony lead to throw us off the track? I think not: their delirious terminology should be taken at its word. The terrorists felt they had a man- date. They made war, and didn't strike randomly at civilians but at a hotbed of Zionists, a stronghold in the enemy camp. This transformation of politics into a holy war became an absolute politicization of the real; the logic of anti- Zionism had been applied with absolute rigor, and turned into a death ma- chine.

There's but one lesson to be learned from this attack: the Jew is absent from anti-Semitism in its murderous form. He for whom the Jews exist will not be the one to kill them: memory at least keeps him from making the move from prejudice to physical attack. For radical anti-Zionists, the Jew does not exist. Unburdened by scruples, and without memory to temper his zeal, he hasn't the slightest notion of what anti-Semitism might be and thus reproduces its horror. As a sincere militant, he isn't one to hide visceral hatred beneath a duplicitous or clever mask. Anti-Zionism is not a style he affects, and there's no limiting principle to its violence. He's protected from doubt and remorse, for the new enemy to be fought is the symbol of every quality the political morality of the last half- century has taught him to hate: racism, imperialism, the supremacy of money. So he commits himself to the cause with the energy of innocence. And it's the most frightening kind of innocence: forgetfulness itself. History would never repeat it- self if its actors didn't occasionally assume the terrible self-certainty of defending a pure and wholly original cause.

ARGUMENT FOR THE UNDETERMINABLE

Anti-Semitism sometimes changes its name, but never its story. It always tells the same dark tale of intrigue and conspiracy. Whether Zionist or Jew, the anti-hero of the tale possesses the same powers: those of the octopus, that multiplex creature ensnaring a mighty count of victims in its tentacles, possessing the powers of a spider patiently weaving its invisible web, enclosing or hoping to enclose the entire human race in its network's coils. It's a picture of the Jew as insect or cephalopod. But why these beasts in particular? Why does the an- tipathy toward I Jews systematically take the form of paranoia? No doubt because the foreignness of Jews is a kind of difference unlike others. They are "those people" whom no label fits, whether assigned by the Gaze, the Concept or the State. There is, to be sure, a Jewish type, but the rule has too many exceptions to be a reliable guide. Or rather for Jewishness, the type is the exception and its absence is the rule: in fact, you can rarely pick out a Jew at first glance. It's an insubstantial difference that resists definition as much as it frustrates the eye: are they are people? a religion? a nation? All these categories apply, but none is adequate in itself. The Jews are to be found every- where. Since the breakup of the ghettos, they can't be localized in a single group. Diaspora, invisibility, indeterminacy: it's this triple failure of clarity that makes Jews so vulnerable to accusations of conspiracy. A trifle suffices to make the image seem real, some nothing that transforms historical opacity into intentional mystery, triggering the barely perceptible slippage that turns a "problem people" (I. P. Faye) into an occult sect. You can't recognize a Jew when you see one? It's part and parcel of his secretive nature. He's not easily defined? It's because he pursues unspeakable goals. And "if he is scattered all over the world, it's because all the world must belong to him."15

As we've seen, it's always consoling to explain our frustrations as the result of a single cause, to discover a clandestine order beneath the chaos of the world, even if that orders is an abomination. The conspiracy theme is a pleasing idea. And the Jew, that elusive Other, is the best possible devil for our secular world. If he were just a foreigner, anti-Semitism- a variant of racism -would be content to reject him or keep him at arm's length. But of all possible mongrels it's the Jew alone (or, after Auschwitz, the Zionist) who fits the bill as the Grand Enemy. This is what makes anti-Semitism unique.

The Jews have thus been afflicted with a mystery that they've done everything possible to diminish over the past two centuries. Assimilation, then Zionism shared the common aim of making the fact of one's Jewishness into something of trivial significance. "We're a religion," the liberals would declare, meaning a private faith like Catholicism. "We're a nation," partisan supporters of the return to the land of the Patriachs would exclaim, "a nation in which we will be full citizens, just like the Poles in Poland the the French in France, in a nation which is legally ours." The two projects were bound to conflict, since one advocated the individual's assimilation while the other laid claim to "that model of social organization - the nation-state --through which other peoples guaranteed their security and way of life." But the basic procedure was the same. In each case it was a question of making the complex simple, of changing a muddy picture to one of perfect clarity. What Zionist and the backers in integration each wanted in their own way was for Judaism to put an end to its undecidability and become a categorizable difference. Whether as a religion or nation, their otherness would acquire the definitive quality of a comprehensible attribute, and cease being a dark continent onto which everything possible could be projected. The case would be closed.

False hopes. Today we live in the post- Zionist but also the post-assimilationist era, and the situation is less clear than ever. The need to give the word Jew an unequivocal and precise content remains an unfulfilled dream, and is hardly to be achieved through an act of intellectual will. "May there be neither Jews nor Christians unless it be at the moment of prayer for those who pray"- such was the ideal that the philosophy of the Enlightenment set before the Jews. Modernity itself has its origins in this principle. Neither Jews nor Christians, in fact, would exist in the sense that all visible signs of their difference from one another were supposed to have been erased. But in spite of everything, Jewishness has refused to confine itself to the sphere of religious life. Jews who are atheists or assimilated enough to be indistinguishable from their neighbors persist and continue to remain Jewish, even when they have little idea what their obstinacy means. What is this religion that isn't one and makes its claims felt on the unbelievers? What meaning can the noun Jew carry when it no longer signifies a faith or affiliation? Instead of being resolved, the enigma has become darker yet. And Zionism's success hasn't changed the equation: the Diaspora has demonstrated loyalty to Israel as well as its own wish for survival. Solidarity, at least, has taken every form save that of emigration. The Jews have a kingdom they want to support without necessarily moving there themselves. In short, the realization of Zionism has only added the dimension of statehood to the Jewish experience, without suppressing its other components. Jewishness is no more determined by its national definition that by its places of worship or liturgical practice.

And so when Jacques Fremontier asserts: "I think that Israel renders an immense service to French Jews: either one feels Jewish, and goes there; or one doesn't feel Jewish and in- stead stays here"I7- the author of Worker Stronghold mistakes, as they say, his desire for reality. The former communist militant has kept up the sharp totalitarian reflexes he acquired during his time in the PC (French Communist Party), especially the penchant for reductionism that Kundera describes: every- thing must be political, with no exceptions made. Aspects of real experience that can't be included are voided and legislated out of existence. As Fremontier puts it, there's exactly nothing between French and Israeli citizenship. The construction of such a peremptory analysis works as a kind of hypnotic self- suggestion, serving to dismiss uncertainty and to keep it at bay. For a certain nostalgia lurks beneath the apparent brutality of Fremontier's words. While the state of Israel has helped the Jews of France in ways that are undeniable, it hasn't succeeded in making their situation any simpler: neither Zionism nor assimilation can claim to have settled the Jewish question. For a final resolution would be undesirable. Something unfinished is at work in contemporary Jewry, something impure and bastardized -a deafness that refuses enlightenment, and a stubborn refusal to let itself be encompassed by a stable and recognized concept. To those of us schooled in the categories of class, state and religion, such pushcart Jewishness -borrowing from each of these notions without fitting anyone of them -can appear to be a kind of defiance or extravagant opacity. Our identity doesn't ring true: it's out of tune with the words we speak. Nothing could be more natural, it seems, than to want to bring our identity into harmony with the rest and mold the person to fit the system. "Let's be Jewish, but ac- cording to some aesthetic rule, respecting the different versions that comprise it, instead of dragging an aura of the unthinkable and the absurd around with us wherever we go. .."

But there's no need to rush and cave in to this temptation. To nationalize Judaism, or better yet, to make it a church, is to arrest it, in the sense of freezing a changing process or interrogating a smuggler who makes cross-border runs. It is thus to make Judaism subject, under the pretext of bringing our life and discourse into harmony, to the police state and its regime. Restrict the word Jew to a single truth and there we are suddenly capable of judging, categorizing, classifying and finally diminishing those who don't conform to our idea of our common bond. Several Jewish thinkers have begun to practice such small-time terror under the lofty banner of the renewal of Judaism. Shmuel Trigano, for example, when he thinks he's unmasking Yiddishkeit as a corruption of original Judaism. Or take Annie Kriegel, when in the name of solidarity with Israel she crusades against "the mysterious virtues of nostalgia for Yiddishkeit," for the "Sephardic path of the future."I8 There are no phony Jews: there are only authentic inquisitors. No defense will ever be strong enough against the desire to establish orthodoxy, against the desire to make life simple.

We Jews are certainly too busy bustling here and there to nail down a definition of what this collective sensibility means. For the prejudiced, such a "we" has only one meaning, the spirit of clan, cabal or conspiracy. The "we" of collaboration and shady plots. The arachnian "we" of a secret coterie that promotes its interests by illicit means. The Jewish response to such monstrous accusations has traditionally been to deny all solidarity. There is no "we," they declared, for Judaism is a private affair. Today they dare once more to risk affirming them- selves as a community. And just as quickly, certain among them push to normalize this "we," to give it a statist and national content. But why must collective expression always re- main the exclusive province of politics? Why would anything that is not "I" necessarily be a question of power or of state? Judaism's very lack of definition is precious: it shows that political categories of class or of nation have only a relative truth, and stands as a sign of their inability to encompass the world in its totality. The Jewish people don't know what they are, only that they exist, and that their disconcerting existence blurs the boundary, inaugurated by modem reason, between the public and the private.