Author: Thomas Fuller
Publication: The International
Herald Tribune
Date: February 10, 2004
URL: http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/generic.cgi?template=articleprint.tmplh&ArticleId=128917
French schools fight deeply rooted
racism
Montigny-Lès-Cormeilles,
France Head scarves were banned by administrators at the public school
in this Paris suburb long before France began its current round of tortured
debate on the issue.
While the public discussion focuses
on France's vaunted secularism, on women's rights and the definitions of
Frenchness, racism is a silent but powerful undercurrent propelling the
debate.
It's an undercurrent that Sarah
Aguado, a precocious 13-year-old, knows well. As the only Jew in a school
with a large Muslim minority, she was repeatedly insulted and attacked
and finally forced to flee.
Classmates called her a ''dirty
Jew.'' One student slapped her and made a racist remark. Another asked
whether her family in Israel ''owned guns and killed Palestinians.''
Sarah stopped eating and had nightmares,
according to her mother. Five weeks ago, mother and daughter moved to the
south of France, where Sarah enrolled in a new school, relieved to exit
the ''catastrophic'' situation.
[On Tuesday, France's lower house
of parliament voted in favor of banning head scarves and other religious
symbols from the classroom.]
Teachers and Jewish groups said
the larger problem of anti-Semitism in French schools remained deeply ingrained
and would not be solved simply by banning religious headgear.
Anti-Semitism is so prevalent in
some of the housing projects that ring Paris and other major French cities
that ''it's become infused into the lan guage,'' according to Barbara Lefebvre,
a history teacher at a French public school.
''Just about every week I see students
in my class - where there are no Jews - insulting each other by saying,
'Stop it, you Jew.' Or 'No, you can't borrow my pen, it's not yours, Jew.'
Or if their pen is broken they'll say, 'What's wrong with my pen? It's
a Jew.'
''When you point it out, they say,
'This is just a way of speaking.'''
France's interior minister, Nicolas
Sarkozy, said last week that the number of violent anti- Semitic attacks
in the country had declined 37 percent in 2003, with 125 incidents recorded
by police. But teachers and Jewish groups say many incidents of harassment
or anti-Semitic insults go unrecorded.
As part of the government's campaign
against anti-Semitism, the Education Ministry last year established a system
of ''surveillance cells'' specifically to track anti-Jewish incidents.
Officials will issue the first data from this effort sometime in the next
few months.
In the meantime, Jewish groups say,
one measure of anti-Semitism in French schools is the number of Jewish
students switching to Jewish private schools, Catholic schools or moving
to different cities or neighborhoods.
According to Patrick Petit-Ohayon,
the coordinator for Jewish schools at the Fonds Social Juif Unifié,
an umbrella group of Jewish associations, ''hundreds'' of Jewish students
in France have left their schools for new ones because they felt harassed
or uncomfortable.
Total enrollment at Jewish schools
has almost doubled from about 18,000 in 1988 to 30,000 today, Petit-Ohayon
said.
The shift away from public schools
is an important change for the Jewish community in France, which has long
been proud of its tradition of integration.
A spokeswoman for the Education
Ministry, Corinne Stolarski, said that the ministry did not keep track
of the number of Jewish students leaving the public school system, but
that the overall problem of anti-Semitism was ''certainly a trend.''
In order to combat anti-Semitism,
the ministry is giving teachers access to case studies of racist incidents
and is preparing a ''republican booklet'' that will help teachers ''bring
to life the republican ideals among students,'' according to a government
document.
Ultimately, Stolarski said, combating
anti-Semitism needs to be done at the grass-roots level.
''This is a question of personal
responsibility for the people who run the institutions,'' Stolarski said.
''This is not something you can legislate against.'' Lefebvre, the history
teacher, says the government's initiative to track anti-Semitic incidents
has been largely unsuccessful because ''it's become so ordinary for students
to use Jewish insults that professors no longer report it - or even take
note.''
''The problem,'' Lefebvre added,
''is that the political awareness that exists at the highest levels of
government has not made it to the lowest levels of the teaching establishment.''
The story of Sarah Aguado illustrates
the overlapping challenges facing teachers today: the ingrained problem
of racism and the breakdown of discipline in the once-vaunted French public
school system.
Violence is a regular feature of
school life, Sarah said, and teachers are ''afraid of the students.''
In autumn 2002 she was attacked
by a fellow student while waiting with a friend in front of her school.
''I didn't even know him,'' she
said of the attacker. ''He started to say to my friend, 'How can you hang
out with a Jew?' Then he started hitting me, slapping me in the face. I
tried to push him away.'' Sarah says she was not injured in the attack
and the boy was expelled.
An administrator at the school confirmed
the incident.
Other attacks in the Paris area
have been more violent.
Two Arab students were expelled
from their high school in December after they repeatedly beat and insulted
a Jewish classmate.
The incident, which was well covered
in the French press, shocked the French elite because it happened at the
Lycée Montaigne, a prestigious school located across from the Luxembourg
Gardens, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Paris.
According to an account in Le Monde,
the two students surrounded the victim in the school courtyard one day
last autumn and said: ''All Jews are going to be exterminated, you're going
to disappear.'' The students were starting the sixth grade, which normally
means that they were 11 or 12 years old.
Teachers say racism in schools is
a measure of France's failure to integrate an estimated five million Muslims,
the largest Islamic population in Western Europe. France also has the largest
Jewish population in Western Europe, esti mated at between 550,000 to 700,000
people.
''For a long time we wanted to see
the school system as a place cut off from the violence of the world,''
said Emmanuel Brenner, a teacher who co-authored a book about anti-Semitism
in French schools, ''The Lost Territories of the Republic'' (Mille et Une
Nuits, 2003).
''Because today the poison of anti-Semitism
has massively returned to our country,'' Brenner wrote, ''schools are finding
themselves in the middle of this tormented situation in dozens of cities
and suburbs in France.''
Most anti-Semitic incidents in French
schools are perpetrated by students of North African origin, teachers say.
And although anti-Semitism is often
portrayed by French politicians as a mirror of political events in the
Middle East, Brenner says the racism can also be very personal.
He cites a 2002 survey by the French
polling company TNS Sofres in which 400 French people aged 15 to 24 were
asked whether they would ever live with a Jew. Eight percent of those polled
chose the answer ''personally, no.''
But among Arab respondents of the
same survey 24 percent chose "personally, no.'' Those who study anti-Semitism
in French schools say the problem is not generalized throughout the entire
French school system.
A school administrator in a Paris
suburb says the problem of anti-Semitism is ''very different from one area
to another.'' The administrator, who has a Jewish-sounding name and is
Jewish, said he had ''never had a problem.''
But for the Jewish community as
a whole, the anti-Semitic incidents are both traumatic and polarizing -
especially the trend toward sending children to private schools.
Private Jewish education in France
was almost nonexistent a half-century ago, said Jean- Jacques Wahl, secretary
general of Alliance Israélite Universelle, a French educational
group.
France's public educational system
was touted as the way to instill what the French call ''republican values''
- a sense of citizenship and national solidarity. ''Jewish schools I would
say were against the general spirit of France,'' Wahl said. ''The republican
school was the foundation for the citizen and had an excellent reputation.''
But today, Wahl said, ''people are
beginning to question the republican ideal.'' Wahl's organization manages
a half- dozen private Jewish schools that have 2,000 students enrolled.
''Demand is very, very strong for
spots and we can't fulfill it,'' he said.
Demand for private Jewish schools
sharply increased in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Jewish population doubled
with the influx of Jews from France's former North African colonies.
The total number of Jewish schools
in France increased from about 18 in the 1950s to 47 in the 1970s, according
to Petit-Ohayon.
Since then the Jewish population
in France has been relatively stable.
Yet the number of Jewish schools
has increased to about 100 in 2003, Petit-Ohayon said.
Jewish students are also enrolling
at Catholic schools, especially in troubled suburbs.
At St. Benoît de l'Europe,
a Catholic school in the suburb of Bagnolet, east of Paris, Jews make up
about 7 to 8 percent of the 1,100 students enrolled, according to Catherine
Leduc- Claire, the headmistress. The school also has a large number of
Muslim students, she said.
Parents send their children to the
school mainly because they like the emphasis on God and the greater discipline,
she said. Yet even in this stricter environment racist incidents occur.
One young Arab student was suspended
after telling a fellow student, ''If you continue to hang out with that
dirty Jew, I'm going to break your face.''
Leduc-Claire says she questioned
the student, who had not caused any trouble previously, as to why he had
used the racist slur.
''He told me, 'I said that because
I heard it outside and I wanted to show that I could also impress a crowd,'''
Leduc-Claire recalled.
''I don't think there was anything
anti-Semitic at the heart of it,'' Leduc-Claire said. ''But we told him
that it was unacceptable and we suspended him for several days.''
Teachers quoted in ''The Lost Territories
of the Republic'' say anti-Semitic attacks even occur among the youngest
students.
A primary school teacher from the
11th arrondissement in Paris says in a short and anonymous contribution
in the book that she hears primary students say, ''Jew dog,'' or ''Long
live bin Laden'' or ''We're going to burn Israel.''
She recounted a playground incident
in which a 7-year-old Jewish girl was slapped by two or three other children
of the same age, jealous of the snack she was eating. As they slapped her
they called out: ''Dirty Jew!'' International Herald Tribune
