Gerard Leval
When I was a child, my father would sometimes tell me stories from his childhood in his home shtetl in Poland. One of those stories was about the case of Mendel Beilis. Beilis was a Ukrainian Jew who, in 1913, was falsely accused of having killed a young boy in order to use the boy’s blood to make matzah.
The prosecution of Beilis was an echo of the libel of ritual murder that has been used to persecute Jews for hundreds of years. Tsarist Russia has the dubious credit of being the place where this last manifestation of a preposterous and defamatory claim against the Jewish people took place. The only saving grace is that Beilis was ultimately exonerated of the charges against him. In his retelling of the Beilis case, my father highlighted the fear that it generated throughout the Eastern European Jewish community during his childhood.
The memories of my father’s story have remained with me. They were augmented some decades ago by Bernard Malamud’s “The Fixer,” a fictionalized and somewhat sensationalized version of the Beilis case. The only positive aspect of the story was the seeming assurance that it had finally laid to rest the lie of Jewish ritual murder. Excluding the vile episode of Nazism, the end of legal harassment of Jews on false accusations seemed assured — until now.
The unrelenting accusations against Israel and, indeed, Jews generally, of the wanton killing of children in Gaza is resuscitating false and defamatory charges against Jews in a variety of forums throughout the world. The mainstream media has regularly given voice, often subtly and sometimes overtly, to this new form of an ancient libel.
A recent lawsuit filed against the chief rabbi of France, my friend Haïm Korsia, serves to illustrate the point. During an interview on a major French media outlet, Korsia very appropriately suggested that Israel needed to “finish the job in Gaza.” He deplored the loss of life but noted, quite accurately, that until Hamas is eliminated, the bloodshed is likely to continue. He went on to say, “I have absolutely no reason to be embarrassed by the manner in which Israel is conducting the war, by putting its own soldiers in danger.”
One reaction to this very accurate evaluation of the situation in Gaza was the filing of a couple of lawsuits against Korsia. Most notably, Aymeric Caron, a media-savvy and very vocal left-wing member of the recently elected French National Assembly, sued the rabbi for “apologizing for war crimes and crimes against humanity.” He has since been joined by a French Muslim leader in his efforts to harass and embarrass Korsia.
Unhindered by a First Amendment or its equivalent, in France it is possible to sue and prompt public prosecutors to prosecute individuals for statements deemed to be in violation of law. France has a law that prohibits apologizing for war crimes and crimes against humanity and makes any such statement susceptible to legal action. Thus, the enemies of Israel and of the Jewish people are free to attempt to stifle the presentation of support for Israel through legal means.
Seeking to sue the chief rabbi of France, the most visible representative of the third largest Jewish community in the world, is a particularly audacious and vile act. It is itself a kind of libel of the Jewish people and of our national homeland. Yet it is being done openly and shamelessly.
And this is not an isolated incident. The newly constituted French political group called the New Popular Front, an amalgamation of left-wing groups, which now constitutes the largest group within the French National Assembly, is made up of a number of representatives who make the members of our Squad in the United States seem restrained. The blatant, unapologetically antisemitic rhetoric used by certain members of the left and, in particular, of a political group known as La France Insoumise (usually translated as France Unbowed) echoes and even amplifies the worst of the attacks against Jews that have traditionally been associated with the extreme right.
The Oct. 7 attack, instead of reducing the anti-Israel sentiment of the left in France, has actually accentuated it. Every attack by Israel against Hamas in Gaza is seized upon as another excuse to attack Israel and to leave Jews ever more concerned about their place in French society. Even French President Emmanuel Macron has now become concerned about the radicalization of the left and its espousal of antisemitism. In spite of the electoral victory of the left, he has just appointed a centrist as the new prime minister, seemingly in an effort to stem the leftward tide.
While that effort is commendable, the willingness of so many on the left to unapologetically articulate antisemitic sentiments — something which but a few years ago would have been unacceptable and might have prompted the government itself to seek to prosecute its purveyors — is quite troubling.
The mainstream media is seemingly attempting to tamp down this growing antisemitism. Caron’s lawsuit against Korsia has been given very little publicity. (Indeed, so little that the couple of articles that initially appeared in leading newspapers announcing the filing can no longer be found.) In some quarters in France, it may finally be dawning that allowing antisemitism to run rampant can undermine all of society.
If that should be the case, then maybe the lawsuit against Korsia, will, like the prosecution of Beilis, turn out to be the end of a phase of anti-Jewish comportment by demonstrating the danger and absurdity of this kind of behavior. For the sake of the French Jewish community this is very much to be hoped for.
Gerard Leval is a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of a national law firm.
