SUSAN DUNN
French Anti-Semitism and
the Cult of the Soil
Jews teaching Arabs to grow
bananas?
If Maurice Barres, the famous right–
wing French nationalist and anti-Dreyfusard, had climbed into a Time
Machine a hundred years ago and been able to read in a recent issue of
The New York Times
about Israelis instructing their Arab neighbors to do
just that - to turn the Egyptian desert into acre upon acre of sunny ba–
nana groves - he probably would have been startled right out of his magic
seat. Today, the agricultural realities of Israel stand in bold contradiction
to centuries of anti-Semitic French mythology, which traditionally has
feared the takeover of France by bands of international Jewish financiers
who held the French "land" not just in their pocketbooks, but worse, in
contempt.
And yet, as some of the most famous early Zionists recognized, there
were germs of truth in certain elements of this mythology. Today, what
Jews once viewed as an insidiously anti-Semitic and hopelessly retrograde
doctrine - the cult of the soil - is now embraced as one of the pillars of
Jewish nationalism.
Indeed, even the philo-Semitic Abbe Gregoire, one of the leaders of
the French Revolution and great heroes in the struggle for Jewish eman–
cipation, discerned some truth in the age-old story that the Jews were
always nomads and shepherds, never farmers . Gregoire sought not to
condemn but to understand the Jewish past and mold its future. He sym–
pathetically explained that a wandering people, denied a homeland, ex–
cluded from citizenship, and deprived of civil rights, would naturally
choose to identify with money values instead of land values, since their
only security would be in transportable wealth. Gregoire recognized that
J ews made commerce flourish in all corners of the world but regretted
that rarely were they "zealous patriots." He wanted not only to make
them French citizens but, more important, he wanted to make them
French. For this, they would have to be converted to a new cult, the
cult
of the land. "Once the Jew has become a member of the nation, attached
to the State by bonds of pleasure, security, freedom and well-being, we
wi ll see his
esprit de corps
diminish, he will not be tempted to locate his
