by Leonid on 02 May 2005, 11:25
Commentary
May 2005
Jews, Arabs, and French Diplomacy: A Special Report
David Pryce-Jones
The resounding slogan of “liberty, equality, fraternity,” leaves no room for racism in the French state, in theory. In practice, over the two centuries since that slogan was coined, rulers of France have tried with varying success to fit two peoples—Arabs and Jews—into their grand design for the French nation and for its standing in the world. Today, as long-held but misconceived ambitions collide, racism with its hates and fears increasingly plagues France, calling into question the relationship that the country’s Arab and Jewish minorities have with each other, that each has with the state, and that the state has with Arab nations on the one hand and with Israel on the other.
The official position taken toward French Jews goes back to the revolution of 1789. In December of that year, during a debate over granting citizenship to the country’s Jewish minority, Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, a liberal aristocrat, declared in the Constituent Assembly: “Everything must be refused to the Jews as a nation, and everything granted to the Jews as individuals.” This idea was soon enshrined in law. Behind it lay the suspicion that Jews had their own brand of nationalism, one that cut across the French nationalism emerging from the revolution. To the French elite, moreover, Jews have consistently seemed to be the conspiratorial tools of others, first of Germany and Russia, then of Britain, and finally, in the 20th century, of Zionists.
What is remarkable is that, in spite of the unregenerate anti-Semitism revealed and unleashed by the Dreyfus Affair at the end of the 19th century, in spite even of French participation in the Nazi mass murder of World War II, French Jews have generally accommodated themselves to the state’s view of the necessary relation between them, and have been content, at least until recently, to downplay the ethnic element in their own identity as a people. This has, however, been less true of those hailing from French-speaking North Africa, who today make up the majority of the 600,000-strong community. In addition, the return of anti-Semitism during the last few years in France has willy-nilly raised the ethnic consciousness of even the most assimilated elements of the older community.
On the Muslim and Arab side, although virtually no Muslims lived in France until the 20th century, the French state long regarded its vital interests as tied up in Arab lands. Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1798 campaign in Egypt and the French invasion of Algeria in 1830 were military adventures undertaken with the express purpose of emulating imperial Britain: England might have India, but France could move into, and ultimately colonize, the Arab world. Moreover, France traditionally claimed the right to protect Catholics and Christianity in the Ottoman empire, and in the Holy Land in particular; in 1843, a French consulate opened in Jerusalem. By the 1850’s, Napoleon III and his administration had elaborated the concept of a “Franco-Arab kingdom,” grandiosely expanding this to visualize France itself as “a Muslim power” (une puissance musulmane).
In a gesture aimed at rewarding North African Arabs for their service in World War I, the Great Mosque of Paris was opened in 1926. But large-scale immigration did not begin until after the end of the Algerian war in 1958, when 250,000 so-called “harkis,” Algerians who had opposed the nationalist movement, sought refuge in France. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, immigrants arrived steadily from each of the newly independent Maghreb countries. Initially they were allowed to come only as guest workers seeking to better themselves and return home, but a change of law in 1974 gave them residence and other rights.
The size of today’s community is a matter of contention. A figure of upward of 6 million has long been accepted, but Nicolas Sarkozy, a one-time minister of the interior now aspiring to be president, and the semi-official newspaper Le Monde have both spoken of 5 million, while the demographer Michèle Tribalat has reduced this further to 3.65 million. Muslims tend to congregate in the outskirts of the great cities, where bad housing conditions and a lack of employment generate all the ills and violence of alienation. More than 5,000 mosques serve as community centers; at the national level, there is a representative Muslim institution, the Conseil français du culte musulman (CFCM). Some of the demands or practices of Islam being incompatible with bedrock republican secularism, embarrassing conflicts have arisen like the one over the right of Muslim girls to wear the hijab in school; it took the French authorities fifteen years to decide that this defied the constitution.
Depending on the figure one accepts, Muslim Arabs outnumber Jews in France by a factor of at least six to one, perhaps by as much as eight to one. As the number of Arabs rises, and as France fails to deliver on its promise of equality and prosperity, the question of their place as a minority has come increasingly to the fore. That question has been made all the more complicated by the fact that, over the decades, Arabs and Jews alike have transformed themselves from passive subjects of history into active agents on the world stage, acquiring new identities and modern nation-states of their own.
For Arabs, one of the most evident signs of self-identity is hostility toward Jews and Israel. In a 2003 collection of essays about Islam in France, the sociologist Barbara Lefèbvre offered typical examples of this prejudice in the younger generation. Addressing a teacher, a boy in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis quotes his father: “There will be a final war between Muslims and Jews, and the Jews will be destroyed; it says so in the Qur’an.” In another Paris district, a teacher overhears Arab children telling Jewish children: “Jewish dogs, we’re going to burn Israel, go back to your country.”
Of course, Arab aggression against Jews has been rising everywhere in the last decades. But it is particularly virulent in France, where it has been accompanied by occasional loss of life, street violence against individuals, and bombings of synagogues, restaurants, offices, and shops. For a long time, the authorities maintained that this was mere hooliganism rather than the manifestation of a vengeful jihad. (Many Arab ghettos are outside the law: no-go areas for the police.) But as it became clear that imams were using their mosques to preach anti-Semitism and the hatred of all non-Muslims, the agents of law enforcement at last began to take action. A number of extremists have been deported, and the police have been able to foil and arrest terrorists coming from Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Morocco.
But this is to raise a much larger issue—namely, the differential attitude of the French elite toward Arabs and Jews. Much has been written about the role of European academics, intellectuals, and journalists in excusing, justifying, or sympathizing with Muslim anti-Semitism. But no less pertinent, and arguably more so, is the role of policy-makers. Ideas and attitudes work downward from the political elite that conceives them to the people who have to live with the consequences.
The French foreign ministry, generally referred to as the Quai d’Orsay, is the institution above all others in France that has been responsible for realizing the state’s grand design and the political outcome that has followed from it. The archives of that institution, along with the testimony of generations of diplomats writing in their memoirs, show how a small number of highly motivated and carefully selected men have fostered preconceptions of Arabs and Jews that have now come to threaten the integrity of the French nation.
The Quai d’Orsay
Situated next to the National Assembly on the left bank of the Seine, the Quai d’Orsay occupies a splendid building in the opulent style of 19th-century Paris. Here, both the site and the architecture declare, is where the nation’s fate is shaped, by men of exceptional intelligence. Many of these men have had literary as well as diplomatic gifts: a huge body of memoirs harks back with nostalgia to the enduring club-like atmosphere of the place, symbolized in the tea ceremony at five o’clock where the Quai d’Orsay in its heyday used to gather and consolidate its collective thoughts.
Recurrent governmental instability has reinforced the importance of the Quai d’Orsay. Between September 1870 and August 1914, for example, there were no fewer than 30 foreign ministers of France; the pace of turnover was just as turbulent during the Fourth Republic (1949-59), improving only in today’s Fifth. Although a few foreign ministers have been able to impose their own policy objectives, the majority have come and gone with bewildering rapidity and to little effect. Prime ministers have further devalued the position by often reserving it for themselves. In sum, foreign ministers have had to rely disproportionately on their permanent civil servants: not only their private staffs but the secretary-general of the Quai d’Orsay, also referred to as the political director, and the heads of its various departments.
From the start, the ministry was staffed by self-selected members of the aristocracy. Competitive examinations were introduced in 1894, but this and other reforms mainly served to perpetuate the ministry’s sense of itself, handed down by the old to the young. In successive generations, the Cambons, Herbettes, Margeries, François-Poncets, and Courcels became nothing less than dynasties. In The French Foreign Office and the Origins of the First World War, 1898-1914 (1993), H. B. Haynes writes that entry to the Quai d’Orsay was determined by “nepotism, patronage, and political persuasion [that was] Catholic and hostile to Jews and Protestants and the parliamentary system.”
Indeed. A document in the archives from October 1893 reveals that “an Israelite” by the name of Paul Frédéric-Jean Grunebaum had applied to the personnel office of the Quai d’Orsay and wished to know “if this fact [was] of a kind to forbid him access to a diplomatic or consular career.” The margin carries a note from Louis Herbette, secretary general at the time: “I saw M. Grunebaum, who spontaneously withdrew his request. . . . He bowed with good grace to the motives dictating the department’s decision.”
By the 1920’s, the diplomatic service was open to Jews, but they would have needed thick skins to survive. As J.-B. Barbier, who joined the Quai d’Orsay in 1904, commented in his memoirs, “the career had no Jews among its members, at least as far as the important governing levels were concerned.”* And this was a matter of some gratification since Jews, Barbier held, belonged to an “often parasitical ethnic element,” and the way some of them had managed to penetrate the service was “disastrous.” Against one of them, Jean Marx, the head of overseas cultural programs, Barbier would wage a passionate campaign as the epitome of the “anti-national Jew” who, duly backed by “International Jewry,” had recruited unreliable and even traitorous people of his own kind.
Jews in the Mind of the Quai d’Orsay
The historical record displays evidence of unremitting hostility to Jews, decade after decade.
In 1840, a rumor spread in Damascus that an Italian Capuchin friar and his Arab servant had disappeared. The French consul in the city, Comte Ulysse de Ratti-Menton, immediately accused the Jewish community of ritual murder, and persuaded the Ottoman governor to arrest Jewish notables and hold Jewish children hostage. Some of the notables died under torture; others were forcibly converted to Islam.
The scandal rocked Europe, but Ratti-Menton was unrepentant and the Quai d’Orsay defended him. In the National Assembly, Prime Minister Adolphe Thiers complained that Jews were “besieging all the chancelleries with their petitions.” When Arab media today depict ritual murder as a fact of Jewish life, they are retailing, whether they know it or not, lessons learned from French teachers long ago.
But the seminal event of the 19th century was the 1890’s trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer falsely accused of betraying military secrets to the Germans. The conspiracy to prove Dreyfus guilty of treason was hatched in the ministry of war; the Quai d’Orsay stayed at a watchful distance. But when the guilty verdict was declared in December 1894, and partisans of Dreyfus’s innocence refused to let the injustice stand, a number of ambassadors could be heard lamenting the damage to France that the case was doing. The brilliant but slippery Maurice Palèologue represented the foreign ministry in 1899 at Dreyfus’s successful appeal. He saw the documents, met the officers who had forged the incriminating evidence, looked hard at Dreyfus’s face as the reprieve was about to be announced, and thought he could detect there a perduring Jewish trait: “an immense pride beneath a mask of humility.” Fortunately, he would confide in a letter to a colleague, he himself was immune as a diplomat from prosecution.
Few men left a greater mark on the Quai d’Orsay than Paul Cambon, born in 1843, and his brother Jules, two years younger. Both were powerful personalities. Paul, ambassador in London for 22 years, was a principal architect of the Entente Cordiale with Britain. Jules served in Washington. Both were also involved with Arab affairs, Paul as resident in Tunisia, Jules as governor-general of Algeria. Paul believed that Dreyfus, as a Jew, was a traitor by definition, and appears to have changed his mind only once the appeal process had started; his brother Jules, in common with many other colleagues in the diplomatic service, persisted in thinking Dreyfus guilty to the end. To one of those colleagues (Auguste Gérard), the anti-Dreyfus forces were the “natural defenders” of the nation, the “true representatives of France and its genius.”
Pogroms in czarist Russia were occurring at the same time as the Dreyfus trial in France. A. Bompard, ambassador in Saint Petersburg from 1902 to 1908 and a man much esteemed at the Quai d’Orsay, wrote in an August 1903 report: “I pass over in silence anti-Jewish disturbances such as those in Kishinev because they are, so to speak, on the rebound from agrarian disturbances. The Jewish population . . . is a nursery of nihilists and agitators.” A year later, writing to Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé, he compared the Finns, “wise and calm,” to the Jews, “detested but [economically] indispensable at the same time, themselves full of hatred as they hold the people to ransom and undermine authority.”
In due course Paléologue succeeded Bompard at Saint Petersburg. Czarist policy toward the Jews, he asserted, seemed devised to sustain
their hereditary defects and their bad passions, to exasperate their hatred for goyim, to plunge them deeper into their talmudic prejudices, to affirm them in their state of permanent inner rebellion, to bring the indestructible hope of promised reparations shining in their eyes. . . . [T]he vengeful and vindictive stubbornness of the Jews could not have found a more favorable climate.
In 1915, as World War I raged, he sent a laconic telegram: “Since the beginning of the war, Russian Jews have not had to submit to any collective violence. . . . In the zone of operations a few hundred Jews have been hanged for espionage: nothing more.”
The Catholic Factor
In the late 19th century, the French built up their position simultaneously in North Africa and in the Ottoman provinces comprising Syria, Lebanon, and the Holy Land. In the latter case, the process was slow and piecemeal, often promoted by pious and wealthy individuals. Comte Paul de Piellat, for instance, settled in Jerusalem, purchasing real estate and bequeathing it to the Catholic Church. The French had hospitals in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Nablus, as well as monasteries and seminaries and several churches; they also owned and operated the Jeru-salem-Jaffa railway.
In 1888 the Vatican decreed that Catholics and Catholic institutions in the Levant should henceforth look for protection exclusively to France. Prime Minister Jules Ferry, most imperial of French politicians, held that “this protectorate of Christians in the Orient is in some sense part of our Mediterranean domain.” Aspiring to counteract the British, who were then consolidating their hold on Egypt, Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanotaux believed that, through its Catholic protectorate, France was now the only European power “capable of acting without fatal contention but side by side with Muslim monotheism.”
Treaties in 1901 with the Turkish sultan and in 1913 with the Young Turks protected France’s privileged position in the Holy Land, then still under Ottoman dominion. A Comité de l’Asie Française was founded in 1901; eight years later, a second committee was formed to develop “our moral, economic, and political standing in the Orient.” These appeared to be building blocks toward the goal of becoming a true “puissance musulmane.”
The anti-clericalism of the French Left, and France’s eventual break with the Vatican, cut right across any such sweeping Catholic ambitions. Soon, too, Germany, Italy, and Russia would challenge France’s position, expanding the institutions belonging to their own respective religions. Kaiser Wilhelm’s visit to the Holy Land in 1898 represented one such open challenge.
Zionism vs. French Ambitions
The rise of political Zionism promised to bestow a modern national identity on the Jews, one that would altogether overturn the French state’s preferred definition of who they were. French diplomats in central and eastern Europe, where the most ardent Zionists could be found, were quick to register dismay and to search for the causes, open or occult, of this disturbing new development. Writing from Bucharest in June 1902, L. Descoy regretted the “extreme enthusiasm” of that city’s Jewish community at the arrival of Bernard Lazare, a gifted French Jewish polemicist and early Zionist, suggesting that it had been whipped up by a newspaper “whose leading editors are Israelites.” In Budapest, Vicomte de Fontenay, in charge of the consulate, reported in August 1906 that, for the Magyar population, the advent of Zionism was “a new cloud” on the horizon, one likely to grow “worse with time.” In February 1912, Max Chouttier, consul in Salonika, relayed warnings against Zionism in the official local press, expressing the hope that these warnings would “give the Jewish communities pause for thought and encourage them to oppose Germano-Zionist propaganda.”
G. Deville, minister in Athens, commented adversely on the role in Salonika of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, the school system set up by French Jews to promote Jewish education and culture in the Middle East. To Deville, the Alliance was screening its true ambitions; its Parisian director “might be a good Frenchman, but those of his religion in Salonika think only of serving themselves and not of serving France. . . . In these circumstances, is it to our benefit to upset the Greeks in order to flatter Jewish pride?” In Le Mirage Oriental (1910), Louis Bertrand, another polished writer-diplomat, wrote of the “displeasing” Jews he had met in Ottoman Palestine, with “their hybrid clothes, half European, half Oriental, dirty, with glowering looks . . . hordes crazed with poverty and mysticism.”
In the Holy Land itself, Zionism had implications far greater than it did in Europe: by definition, it represented a rival to French expansionism and France’s Catholic protectorate. The spontaneous reaction was twofold—to heap contempt on Jewish nationalism and to sponsor Arab nationalism in opposition to it.
Najib Azoury, a Maronite Christian from Beirut who had once been employed in the Ottoman bureaucracy in Jerusalem but now lived in Paris, published a booklet, Le Réveil de la nation arabe, predicting that Jews and Arabs were destined to fight until one eliminated the other. The Quai d’Orsay apparently subsidized a journal, L’Indépendence arabe, that this unsavory character began to put out in 1907, and paid for a meeting in Paris in June 1913 at which 23 Arabs from Syria and the Holy Land effectively launched the Arab nationalist movement.
After World War I, two highly restricted groups of specialists in the Quai d’Orsay handled the redrawing of the map of the Middle East in the wake of the demise of the Ottoman empire. The personnel overlapped, and were of a single mind: France already controlled the Arab western shores of the Mediterranean, and now could add the eastern ones, what these experts referred to as la Syrie intégrale or Greater Syria (that is, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine). The question before them was how to turn both Arab nationalism and Zionism to their purposes.
The background was as follows. François Georges-Picot had been counselor at the wartime French embassy in London. In secret negotiations in 1916 with Sir Mark Sykes, a Conservative member of Parliament, he reached what he believed was an agreement granting France possession of la Syrie intégrale after the war. The Germans, it was suspected, were about to issue a proclamation of support for Zionism, and this could swing Russian Jews to their side, with ominous consequences for the outcome of the war; American Jews were thought to exercise a comparable influence on their country’s policy. Therefore, according to André Tardieu, the French high commissioner in the U.S. and a future prime minister, the right of Jews to self-determination should be taken into consideration, lest “certain elements in American Jewry” lose interest in helping to recover Alsace and Lorraine for France.
Others similarly saw the Jews as holding France’s postwar fate in their hands. On May 7, 1917 Jean Gout, head of the Asian section of the foreign ministry with responsibility for the Ottoman provinces, sent a memorandum to Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau:
The millenarian hopes of the Jews, especially the proletarians of Poland and Russia, are not socialistic as their social standing might suggest, nor national as the declarations of their intellectuals pretend, but they are essentially talmudic, that is to say religious. These poor devils have been nurtured on myths of misery which gives them a glimpse of Jerusalem as the end of their ills. . . . Even intelligent and educated Jews who have come to the top in countries with equal opportunities cherish for generations in a corner of their heart the dream of the old ghettos. Thanks to their wealth and the links they preserve among themselves, and the pressure they exert on ignorant governments, they represent an international weight.
An earlier proposal, to help create a small autonomous Jewish state with Hebron as its capital and Gaza as its port, had prompted Jules Cambon to comment bitingly that the Jews there could “grow oranges and exploit each other.” But since the powers were all bidding for Jewish favor, the French could, too; in June 1917, Cambon wrote a letter assuring the Zionist leadership of French support “in the renaissance of the Jewish nationality in that land from which the people of Israel were exiled so long ago.” This letter was no sooner sent than regretted, as the Quai d’Orsay rapidly returned to circulating anti-Zionist memoranda and bombarding the British with demands to abstain from any action that might raise unrealizable Jewish hopes.
That November, Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary, issued the declaration bearing his name. It was far more supportive of Zionism than Cambon’s letter. The British government, Balfour wrote, was in favor of “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. With 150,000 soldiers fighting the Turks to France’s 800, the British were able to propose and dispose. On Christmas day 1917, Field Marshal Edmund Allenby entered Jerusalem with Georges-Picot in his entourage. At a picnic, the latter suggested setting up the civil administration he thought he had negotiated with Sykes. Also present was Lawrence of Arabia, and his description of Allenby’s scornful response is one of the more famous passages in Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
In December, a French diplomat in the embassy in London reported that, although wealthy English Jews were hostile to the Balfour Declaration, the enthusiastic view of poor and immigrant Jews was that “the Israelite race was superior to all others; it possessed colonies in all the countries and one day it shall dominate the world.” An unsigned position paper from around the same time suggested that Zionists, who drew their strength from the mysticism of Russian-Polish Jewry, were trying to spread their nefarious ideas to Jews in Algeria and Morocco, thereby seeking “to exploit great-power rivalry.” The author had some classic advice: “Our Jewish policy in North Africa is necessarily linked to our Muslim policy. We have to avoid Jewish nationalism, as also pan-Islamism or pan-Arabism, by favoring a slow and careful evolution in the direction of our civilisation.”
On January 15, 1919, Foreign Minister Stephen Pichon instructed Paul Cambon to alert the British government to the Zionist danger, lest it become a cause for international trouble in the Middle East. “The Zionists must understand once and for all that there can be no question of constituting an independent Jewish state in Palestine, or even forming some sovereign Jewish body.” Three days later Cambon reported back. He could hardly believe the conversation he had just had with Balfour. In his usual dilettantish manner (Cambon wrote), Balfour had said that “it would be interesting to be present at the reconstitution of the [ancient] Kingdom of Jerusalem.” When Cambon protested that, according to the New Testament book of Revelation, such an event would signal the end of the world, Balfour rejoined: “It would be still more interesting to be present at the end of the world.”
Between the Wars
The postwar treaty of peace signed at Sèvres settled the disposition of the former Ottoman provinces. France was to have a mandate for Syria, but not for Greater Syria: Palestine would be incorporated into a British mandate. Since the British at least were Christian (where the Ottomans had been Muslim), France duly renounced the letter of its Catholic protectorate. But not the spirit: as a Catholic paper, L’Oeuvre d’Orient, editorialized, “It is inadmissible that the ‘Country of Christ’ should become the prey of Jewry and of Anglo-Saxon heresy. It must remain the inviolable inheritance of France and the Church.” The Quai d’Orsay never ceased to play one side off against the other, at every level.
In October 1919, General Henri Gouraud arrived in Damascus to take up his appointment as French high commissioner and to scatter the minuscule number of Arab nationalists who sought to resist the French mandate. Meanwhile, Georges-Picot was alerting the Quai d’Orsay that British authorities in Jerusalem were finally becoming aware of growing Muslim restiveness, something that “could only be to the profit of our influence.” During the first six months of 1920, Gouraud bombarded his superiors with anti-Zionist telegrams. Both Muslims and Christians, he wrote, were expecting conditions in Palestine to be worse under the British than under the Turks. Suggesting the need for a renewed Catholic protectorate, he thought the French “should take advantage of circumstances to enlarge the scope of this protectorate to include the Muslims whom we cannot leave alone and unarmed to face Zionism.” A February 1920 dispatch states outright that Palestine would benefit from the guardianship of France.
Since the exact boundary between the French and British mandates remained uncertain, Gouraud’s personal secretary, Robert de Caix, was dispatched to Jerusalem to discuss the issue with Sir Herbert Samuel, the British high commissioner. One historian, Peter A. Shambrook, has described de Caix as “the eminence grise at the Quai d’Orsay on the Levant question.” In a preliminary letter dated October 19, 1920, de Caix confirmed what was already political orthodoxy in his circle: the British and the Jews were conspiring together against French interests. From the outset he felt personally slighted because he had been “received in a rather mediocre way.” Samuel, he explained,
represents in Palestine what it is appropriate to call Anglo-Jewish policy. This well-mannered English Jew, scraped clean of the ghetto, has been completely taken up in Jerusalem by his tribe, and he attends synagogue, accepts no invitations on the Sabbath, and on holy days goes only on foot. It is a strange phenomenon when one reflects on the evident ignominy of Jews from Galicia and other surrounding regions who are now flooding Palestine but who draft people like Sir Herbert into their buffoonery. Before doing anything worthwhile in the country, these people dream of spreading at our expense, and you may be sure that the complete Jewry of both hemispheres will apply a policy consisting of rejecting our frontier.
In a lengthy final report, de Caix mentioned another personal insult: Samuel had declined an invitation to dine at the French consulate on the Sabbath. British policy, de Caix elaborated, may have been intended to exploit Jewish strength against France, but was in fact being exploited by it. Jews had infiltrated the local administration, and British officials were either lying low or leaving the country in disgust. As for the Jews, their religion was only a means to an end—“passionate nationalism and a thirst for revenge.” They would prove, he continued, harmful neighbors:
The frequent revolutionary and prophetic spirit of the Jews derives from the Bolshevism of the colonists whom Eastern Europe is sending to Palestine. Through conviction, and also through their instinctive tendency to fragment societies whose cohesion might stand in the way of their expansion, these people will . . . try to break the traditional framework of religious confessions [in Lebanon and Syria] that are already threatened for other reasons.
British rule in Palestine, de Caix concluded, amounted to a kind of despoiling. It had been allowed to occur only because the French had sacrificed themselves for the Allied cause on the Western front. But the French language and French intellectual influence were and ought to have remained paramount in the Holy Land. After all, the principal door of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was constructed “in the solid and massive ogival style born in the 12th century in the Ile de France.” He ended with the consoling thought that the future of Zionism remained doubtful: more than any other people, the Jews had lost the habit of agriculture, and their settlement of the land was artificial, expensive, and divisive. “If under the British mandate the native [Arab] peoples have a tendency to react, there is every chance that they will try to maintain, as indeed they do in Egypt, the French culture, which retains such attraction.”
On November 3, General Gouraud seconded the conclusions of de Caix’s “remarkable report,” adding his opinion that Zionism was a threat to Syria as well. The loss of the Catholic protectorate made the care of French institutions more essential than ever. Twelve days later, Georges-Picot in a telegram from Beirut informed the ministry that British authorities in Jerusalem were taking precautions against riots and warning Muslims that they would be held responsible for any disorder. “This [British] attitude can only benefit our influence, as irritation with Zionism is only growing among . . . Muslims.” French consuls in mandatory Palestine became increasingly alarmist: Durieux in Haifa reported that the British were recruiting unemployed Jews as the core of a future Jewish army, and that Jewish and Protestant elements were attempting to cut the ground out from under the Catholics (that is, France). In May 1921, after riots in Jaffa, Durieux could at least write in relief that “our car was borne in triumph by the population crying ‘long live France, down with the Jews.’”
De Caix’s interpretation of Zionism would have a lasting impact at the Quai d’Orsay. From the French protectorate of Morocco, Marshal Hubert Lyautey, perhaps the most respected spokesman for old-style French imperialism, reiterated in June 1923 that Zionism lacked any internal authenticity; at the same time, he advised extreme caution lest this doctrine, which had “received its directives from abroad, [and] served principally the interests of a determined power,” be imported into Morocco.
Seeking to show who the Jews really were, an unsigned report dated December 2, 1925 drew attention to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Although this work, purporting to show evidence of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world, had already by then been exposed as a czarist forgery, the author gives credence to its “facts” and concludes that, if the matter is to be taken seriously, have to deal with a really diabolical plan.” That same year, the French ambassador in Warsaw reported that a local Zionist conference constituted an appeal for special privileges by Jews unwilling to accept any idea of Polish nationality, or even of simple loyalty. Covering another Zionist congress in Cracow ten years later, the succeeding ambassador to Poland adapted this same critique to the changing tenor of the times: “Basing themselves on conceptions that are more racial than religious, they aspire to set up on both banks of the Jordan a Jewish state conceived on the fascist model.” This ambassador appears to have been among the first to draw a comparison between Zionism and Nazism, likening the Revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky to Hitler.
To be sure, one does find an occasional official disposed to a favorable view of Zionism, usually on the basis of first-hand experience. One such was Henry de Jouvenel, Gouraud’s successor as high commissioner in Syria. He visited Jerusalem in 1926 and later wrote: “Anti-Zionist when I arrived in the East, I became Zionist, or rather jealous of the British high commissioner in Palestine and all that the Zionists contribute.” Naturally, he added, France was obliged to support Christians, but the Jews were models of self-help, and their spirit of enterprise was admirable.
There were also realists like Philippe Berthelot, secretary general from 1920 to 1933, who commented that “Zionism is a fact” and regretted only that the Jews of England had understood the point of the movement while French Jews had proved unable to take “the lead of world Jewry to the benefit of France.” At Berthelot’s instigation, the Quai d’Orsay set up a special department for religious affairs under Louis Canet, which soon became, in the words of one historian, an obligatory antechamber for visiting Zionist leaders. After a meeting with Chaim Weizmann in May 1927, Canet concluded a memorandum with a clear expression of his own inne
