Ten years after the Hyper Cacher attack: this anti-Semitism taking root in France

She remembers her astonishment very well. Two days earlier, there had already been the attack on “Charlie Hebdo”. Absolute shock at the unspeakable horror. Then on January 9, this hostage-taking by Amedy Coulibaly of customers of a kosher supermarket which resulted in four deaths. The 32-year-old terrorist was shot dead following the attack by the Raid, the BI and the BRI. “I was still overcome with emotion, immense. And there, the fact of attacking this visible, collective place, clearly identified as frequented by Jews, took me directly back to my origins. I felt an irrational panic,” says Corinne, 59 years old.

This English teacher in a college in a priority area in the suburbs of Amiens (Somme) has never really been in contact with the Jewish world, except through parents, some of whom live in Israel. Atheist, left-wing eco-friendly, she has always lived her Jewish identity through a cultural prism. The music, the gastronomy, the stories told by family elders, the festivals and weddings…

“I had this deep need not to be alone, for this human warmth which forms a united front”

“But I have grandparents, Polish Jews, who were deported. So of course, consciously or not, I live with the heavy legacy of the Shoah and I grew up with the idea that being Jewish is not trivial. » In September 2020, she listened attentively to the trial of the attacks. She then notices: what had happened in the Hyper Cacher – these four lives cut short in a few minutes – had disappeared from collective memory. At the same time, she observed a rise in anti-Semitic remarks within her establishment. “Let’s say that I was more attentive to it and that I felt directly targeted, rightly or not. »

Let’s rewind. Porte de Vincennes in Paris, January 9, 2015. A little after 1 p.m., Amedy Coulibaly burst into the convenience store, heavily armed. A few hours before the start of Shabbat, there is a large crowd of customers. The repeat offender converted to radical Islam, already wanted by the police for the murder, the day before in Montrouge, of a municipal police officer, immediately killed three people and took 17 others hostage, one of whom was killed shortly after.

The young man, French with Malian parents, claims to be part of the “Islamic State” and demands the release of the two brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi who, at the same time, are besieged by the gendarmerie in a printing works in Dammartin-en-Goële, after having massacred 12 people in the attack on “Charlie Hebdo”. Corinne is part of this immense crowd – almost 4 million people – who demonstrated during the “Republican marches” of January 10 and 11, 2015 across the four corners of France. “I had this deep need not to be alone, for this human warmth which forms a united front. »

She is there as a citizen. “This crowd of people was above all shocked by what had happened at “Charlie Hebdo”. » This is confirmed by Solveig Hennebert. In her thesis “The memories of anti-Semitism in France”, the doctoral student in political science at Lumière Lyon-II University collected a series of interviews on the view of French Jews towards this contemporary anti-Semitism. “What is common to many Jewish people, she notes, it is the feeling that the Hyper Cacher attack does not constitute a break with their experience, nor a sudden outbreak of anti-Semitic violence. On the contrary, it is part of the genealogy of recent acts, particularly since the murder of Ilan Halimi in 2006.”

What changed in January 2015 was the multitude of social reactions to the attacks. Quickly, however, in the Jewish world, a certain disenchantment appeared. As Roger testifies to Solveig Hennebert: “We knew very well that on January 11, people were not demonstrating for Hyper Kosher. Because they had not demonstrated for Ilan Halimi, nor after the attack in front of the Jewish school in Toulouse. Hence this feeling of unease, of exclusion, that we had. »

In 2015, the increase in anti-Semitic acts was 300%.

“It is very clear that, immediately and subsequently, what happened in the Hyper Cacher remained in the background. Even today, the attacks of January 2015 are associated with “Charlie Hebdo”. agrees sociologist Michel Wieviorka. This specialist in discrimination, racism, violence and terrorism, is one of the first to have studied the emergence, in France, of a new anti-Semitism at the turn of the 2000s. “The dramatic hostage-taking at Hyper Cacher was not a new event, but a shock of confirmation”he says. And for good reason. According to a fairly well-identified mechanism, anti-Semitic acts jumped following each attack against the Jews.

Official figures show that in 2012, after the terrorist attack against the Ozar Hatorah college in Toulouse, they experienced a 200% increase. When the jihadist Mohammed Merah killed four people, including three children, in front of the establishment, Jewish circles deplored a lack of solidarity from French society.

In 2015, the increase in these anti-Semitic acts was 300%. “The Jewish world has felt threatened for quite a few years now in its daily life, not only in the most significant places, deplores Michel Wieviorka. It is better not to put a Mezuzah in front of your door, this little symbol which means that you are facing a Jewish house, under penalty of being attacked, of seeing your walls tagged… Likewise, for a man, it is preferable to cover the head with a cap rather than wearing a yarmulke. »

To understand recent developments in anti-Semitism, we must, according to the sociologist, start from the turn of the century. At this time, events in the Middle East and the second Intifada were projected onto the French scene. “They are reinterpreted by actors who displayed hatred of Jews in France. Two discourses activate it: the Jews are Israel, and Israel is the presence of a religion which has no place in this part of the world. This religious hatred, heightened in geopolitical terms, will lead to terrorism and radical Islam. analyzes the sociologist.

« The other speech, he continues: the Jews are the oppressors of a people, of a nation. We are not only criticizing the policies of the Israeli government, but we are asserting that the State of Israel has no right to exist. However, it would be the only State in the world whose destruction is being demanded because of the barbarity, the crimes committed by its power. »

The number of anti-Semitic acts has quadrupled since October 7, 2023

All of this will serve to fuel Israeli government propaganda with confirmation that France is not a safe country for Jews. The recipe has worked: for more than twenty years, almost one in ten Jews has made aliyah – that is to say, left France to emigrate to Israel. For her part, Marine le Pen understood the importance of allegedly going to war against anti-Semitism while asserting herself as a friend of the far-right government of Israel.

Hatred of Jews ceases to be virulent and gives way above all to hatred of Islam. “By including her speech in her rallying to the Republic, Marine Le Pen undermines the idea of ​​a republican front against her party, continues Michel Wieviorka. Which not only does not prevent anti-Semitism from progressing, but also strengthens the National Rally and shifts attention towards immigration, the left of the left, the ultra-right. From now on, in France there is a much more diffuse general feeling in the atmosphere of hostility towards Jews. »

According to the Interior Ministry at the time, the number of anti-Semitic acts has quadrupled since the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7, 2023 in Israel. In June, he recorded “366 anti-Semitic facts” in France, or “an increase of 300% compared to the first three months of 2023”. A figure which brings together a wide variety of facts: banners during demonstrations, offensive comments, insults on social networks, threats, thefts, even physical attacks.

A count far from exhaustive and, incidentally, also on the rise for anti-Muslim acts. “The international situation in the Middle East acts as a detonator for the acts committed in France”, explains on France Info Nonna Mayer, researcher at the Center for European Studies at Sciences-Po and emeritus research director at the CNRS.

“Even if they are only the work of a minority, their increase and their media coverage nevertheless have consequences on the Jews of France, including those who are not direct victims. » Especially since, as Michel Wieviorka points out, “living memory, with the survivors, the deportees, who had experienced the destruction of the Jews of Europe up close, has disappeared. And with it, the difficulty in ensuring that the discourse in the public space is more constructed ».

Corinne says she is angry today. Never has she had to justify her Jewish origins so much and never has she had to forcefully reaffirm her hostility against Israeli policy. She who has never set foot in this country. “What I read somewhere recently caught my attention: we are, in France, 1% of the population and suffer 60% of acts of violence », she whispers.