The Hope of Marseille

By Claire Berlinski

France’s most Muslim city offers a surprising model in the war on anti-Semitism.

In the tradition of the city, the mayor maintains strong personal relationships with each member of the group. Whenever tension threatens to rise—for example, after the burning of the Or Aviv Synagogue, and at the beginning of recent hostilities in Iraq—the group meets, and at the mayor’s urging makes some kind of very public display of solidarity. Islamic leaders were present for the burial of the charred Tora scrolls; they were photographed comforting Jewish religious leaders, standing with them arm in arm. This occurred in no other French city. Members of Marseille Espérance have taken trips to the Western Wall. They have hosted conferences and visits from such figures as the Dalai Lama, Elie Wiesel, and the Patriarch of Constantinople. An intercommunity gala is held annually. The organization is so widely held to be effective that government delegations from Brussels, Anvers, Sarajevo, Barcelona, Naples, Turin, and Montréal have come to study it.

It is entirely counterintuitive that Marseille Espérance should work at all. I would scarcely expect a symbolic and powerless group dedicated to “combating intolerance and ignorance” to be so effective, or even to be perceived as so effective. But the faith placed in this group by everyone in Marseille was unexpected and even touching. It was the first thing everyone mentioned to me in our discussions, held out as a model for other cities, offered as proof that if only people would just get together and listen to one another respectfully, strife and violence around the world could be resolved.

I am instinctively chary of bodies that, like the League of Nations, appeal to noble principles with no will or mechanism to impose their fine ideals at the barrel of a gun, and refused at first to believe that this group could truly be any kind of key to the city’s comparative exemption from ethnic tension. But presented with example after example of Marseille Espérance’s civilizing influence, I was forced to conclude there was something to it. When Ibrahim Ali, a young Comorian, was killed by neo-Nazis, the mayor gathered the delegates of Marseille Espérance and enjoined them to pacify the community. They did so. They did so again when a young Frenchman, Nicolas Bourgat, was stabbed to death by a Moroccan immigrant. Marseille Espérance convened at city hall after September 11. Standing by the mayor and the chief of police, the group issued a passionate communiqué denouncing religious fanaticism; again, tensions in the city subsided. They convened at the commencement of recent hostilities in Iraq; afterward, at the urging of the mayor, the Muslim delegates returned to their mosques and called for calm. Other Muslim clerics throughout France used this occasion to incite a frenzy of anti-American and anti-Semitic bloodlust.

The crucial point is not whether it works—it does seem to—but why it works. Although no one will admit it, Marseille Espérance is a political sleight-of-hand. It is, in effect, an end run around the government’s anti-communitarian principles. The violence now emerging from Islamic immigrants and directed toward Jews represents a breakdown in the republican scheme: Certain Muslim immigrants are proving inassimilable; ethnic identity politics are proving stronger than the republican ideal. Of course, it is crucial to stress that only a small fraction of France’s Muslims are committing these crimes; the vast majority are peaceful citizens, prepared and even eager to be assimilated. But a stubbornly inassimilable rump remains, and it is causing a great deal of grief. The reasons for this defy facile explanation. Part of the problem, certainly, is that Islam’s teachings comprise a political program as well as a religious one: Secularism and laïcité are not readily reconciled with Islam’s insistence on the convergence—the identity, even—of the political and devotional realms.⁴ The French government has no real idea what to do about this. There is no tradition, in France as a whole, of managing immigrants who cannot or will not assimilate. But in Marseille, there is.

Since the law forbids the recognition of ethnicity, the city recognizes religions—ethnicity by proxy. Marseille Espérance facilitates the emergence of personalities who represent whole ethnic groups and who forge links between their communities and the rest of the city. It affords Arabs—as Muslims—representation as a group in city politics. By means of their strong connection to the mayor’s office, community leaders have effectively been able to promote an Islamic agenda. They have secured, for example, elaborate slaughter facilities for the ritual animal sacrifice of Eid-el-Kebir and gravesites for Muslims in the Aygalades Cemetery. Negotiations for the construction of a central mosque and an Islamic cultural center in Marseille are under way. In return, the mayor demands that Islamic leaders keep the extremists in their community in check. Here we see the old Marseille tradition: One hand washes the other.

Nothing like Marseille Espérance exists in other French cities. Whatever community leaders and politicians may say—and all will deny it; it is heresy to endorse communitarianism in France—Marseille Espérance institutionalizes and strengthens communitarian politics, and, by bringing religion to the forefront of the political sphere, directly contravenes the ideal of laïcité. It affords official recognition to personalities who act publicly in the name of their cultural and ethnic communities and who have the power to bring the members of those communities into line. In other words, a system born of Marseille’s traditions of patronage and corruption—a tradition entirely antithetical to France’s republican ideals—now helps to keep the peace.

It’s a gift to Marseille from the mob.

The mayor, as a personality, is central to this delicately balanced communitarian ecosystem. In an adroit piece of political jujitsu, Jean-Claude Gaudin defeated the National Front in 1995 while simultaneously putting the Left out of power for the first time since 1953. He is notably one of the most philo-Semitic politicians in France, and a committed Zionist. His official visit to Israel in early 2004 took him to Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, and Maaleh Adumim, the largest settlement in the West Bank. There he declared that “Israeli land must not be given to others.” “Speak not of colonies,” he added, “but of constructions.” On the same trip, he remarked that he had come to appreciate the strategic significance of the Golan Heights. Later, on French radio, he insisted that the settlements were “villas, not shantytowns.” He stressed to assembled Israeli reporters that he favored the transfer of the French Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. His philo-Semitism has carried over to the city’s politics: He is known for his alacrity in responding to anti-Semitic incidents; when hostile graffiti is reported, for example, it is always removed within the hour. He sends his own services to clean it. This is not true in other French cities; recently, for example, in Perpignan, I found fading anti-Semitic graffiti—Juden raus!—scrawled on the walls of a children’s playground; it had clearly been there for quite some time.

Was the mayor a sincere Zionist, I wondered, or was this mere posturing, a quid pro quo in exchange for the electoral support of Marseille’s Jews? I put this question to his deputy mayor, Daniel Sperling, who is also a prominent member of Marseille’s Jewish community. “When a mayor takes an interest in Israel,” he replied, “of course it’s because he’s interested in Jews in France. But the mayor is sincere. First of all, he’s a practicing Catholic, he comes from the Christian Democratic tradition.... The mayor, like Chirac and other members of the Right, has always sincerely admired Israel, the way it was created, the way it works, as a political project, how they transformed the land given them after the Balfour Declaration by means of a strong ideology.... The mayor has always been, how to say it, more than respectful. Impressed by the way the Jews have always conducted themselves.”

A sincere Zionist, then.

“But until a certain time, he confused Israel and the Jews. Up to a point. It’s okay, he understands now. He’s an old politician; he’s seventy-five years old, he’s been in politics for twenty-five years, and for him, Israel was the Jews. A few times, talking to Jews of Marseille, he called Israel ‘your country....’”

This is quite a fundamental error. To suggest that French Jews are not fully French is not republican at all. Even the mayor of Marseille—and perhaps especially the mayor of Marseille—seems something less than completely committed to this principle.

I wondered to what extent the mayor’s public kinship with Israel and Jews was related to Marseille’s comparative calm. Had he set the tone for the city? Had he obliquely sent a message to its Arab population that violence against Jews would not be tolerated? “Of course. The mayor is impressed by zero-tolerance, by the example of New York,” Sperling said. But he seemed to think the key point was not so much that the mayor had reached out to Marseille’s Jews, but that the Jews had reached out to the mayor. “I organized the mayor’s last trip to Israel. I’m a member of the many Jewish associations here. For more than thirty years I’ve been part of the community. I know it by heart.

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