French antisemitism and Islamophobia share a longer tradition of xenophobia aimed at multiple groups

Evidence

Yet it is a well-trodden path among historians of migration in France to identify continuities between the intolerance of the 1930s and 1940s, most typically directed against Jews, and that of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, most typically directed against Muslims. The specificity of antisemitism in the former period and Islamophobia in the latter, though, is not always emphasised—for good reason, because both can also be seen as part of a long tradition of xenophobia in French society, also expressed virulently against fellow Catholic Belgians, Italians and Poles. Moreover, important work by, among others, Paul Gilroy, Michael Rothberg and Max Silverman has questioned the idea that Holocaust memory and colonial memory have always been separate. Part of the contemporary critique of what Gilroy calls ‘camp thinking’, or what Jonathan Judaken calls ‘ticket thinking’, is to question whether such divides are as immutable as they may appear. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1334

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to broader debates on comparative victimhood and the Rothberg/Gilroy ‘multidirectional memory’ literature the reader has encountered elsewhere in this book. — connects to: Fixing on antisemitism as the sole admissible racism blinds France to other institutional bias — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 960