Calling Jesus a "Dirty Jew": Renegotiating the Jewish Question in Contemporary France

In late 2004, the Parisian leadership of the Union des Etudiants Juifs de France (UEJF), the largest French Jewish university students’ union, organized a public relations campaign targeting the post-2000 resurgence of anti-Semitism.  The campaign consisted of images of Jesus and Mary “tagged” with the words “sale juif/ve” [dirty Jew] and subtitled: what if anti-Semitism were everyone’s concern?  Immediately, the LICRA, an anti-racist organization widely viewed as a mouthpiece for Jewish institutional concerns, condemned the ads; and in short order, the UEJF ended the campaign.

Why, in the midst of a wave of anti-Semitism the Jewish community associated with young Muslims, would the UEJF have chosen intentionally controversial Christian imagery?  Why would this choice have been so immediately and powerfully rejected by other Jewish (and not Christian) groups?  And what might this tell us about how differently configured Parisian Jewish institutions understand pluralism and figure the contemporary “Jewish question”?

In this paper I will suggest that, intentionally or not, the UEJF’s ad figured French society as a collection of distinct and yet interconnected communities with deep religious sensibilities.  In other words, the ad campaign simultaneously evoked France’s irreducible religious boundaries and transcended them.  This double move dangerously subverted other, more mainstream French Republican and Jewish narratives about the relationship between and among religious, ethnic, and national identities.