Next year in Jerusalem? ‘La nouvelle judéophobie’, neo-crypto-Judaism and the future of French Jews in Éliette Abécassis’s Alyah

Abstract

Éliette Abécassis, one of the principal flagbearers of a nascent contemporary Jewish-French literature, has written a novel entitled Alyah, which engages in a series of reflections on the future of Jewish life in France. Among other themes, Abécassis tackles the memory of Jewish life in North Africa, especially in Morocco, the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, the affective value of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict for Jews and Muslims in France, and ‘la nouvelle judéophobie’. In this article, I read Alyah in its socio-political context in order to suggest that, while Abécassis highlights at times the potential for Jewish-Muslim solidarity, the novel ends up reproducing an oppositional, conflictual binary of Jews versus Muslims – something that Maud Mandel has termed a ‘narrative of polarisation’.