Rabbi stamp of approval

France has put one of its most famous rabbis on to a stamp.

European Jewish Press reports:

The French postal service have paid tribute to one of the country’s greatest chief rabbis, Jacob Kaplan, by producing a stamp bearing his image.

The stamp was made available in all French post offices on 15 November.

Kaplan was born on 5 November, 1895 in Paris to an Orthodox family from Latvia. Both his father and grand-father were rabbis.

Comments

[Lior]

This commemorative stamp typifies exactly the dichotome that exsits between real life in France and the much vaunted "values of the Republic."

At 600,000 strong, the Jewish commuity in France is, after America, the largest of the Diaspora. Largely Orthodox, it is nonetheless the Sephardic community that has taken the brunt of the increase in anti-Semitic incidents of all degrees of severity to which the lacklustre government of the "escroc" Jacques Chirac failed to react, despite constant and determined lobbying by Jewish groups and which has made the lives of many Jews in France all the more miserable, which the numbers of French Jews buying properties in Israel and also making Aliyah will testify. Rather than place any confidence in the decaying institutions of the Fifth Republic, they are voting with their feet.

Long before Daniel Bernard, French Ambassador to the Court of St. James, declared, with nonchalant Gallic arrogance, Israel to be "ce petit pays merdique" (that shitty little country), it was the opnion of the mainstream of gentile opinion and he must be respected for representing his fellow-countrymen's opinion with such fidelity and outspoken outlandishness. Such has always been the French concept of "la diplomatie". Such has always been the French attitude to Jewry. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

You can't go very far in France without meeting that exotic mix of ignorant Catholic bigotry and those traditional "values of the Republic" which have hermetically sealed the French into an artificial and imagined cultural insularity of supposed "Liberté, Fraternité, Egalité" and which have done nothing but encourage the overpowering idea of the "right kind of Jew" in the face of a predetermined idea of what it should be to be French. For the French are the French - only just occasionally are they truly Republican.

Long before Monsieur l'Ambassadeur opened his "grande gueule" to put his medium rare foot right in it, I heard often enough, and supposedly from friends, that Israel was "un petit pays merdique".

I have seen a colleague humiliated and ridiculed for bending down to pick up what he supposed was a 10 Franc coin, only to find he had inadvertently dropped a 10 centime piece - at a time before the Urine (Ooooops! Beg pardon... the Euro), when resulting inflation hadn't pushed the price of a bifteck up so high you had to remortgage your 5 foot square Paris "apartement" in order to eat.

I have sat, with a French family, and watched the opening scenes of an American film - duly dubbed, they can't read and chew gum at the same time, despite all the intellectual triumphs of the Ecole Normale Supérieure - of which the opening scenes depicted a Berit Milah, and listened to a Catholic litany of prejudice about mutilation and how filthy the mohel's tools were.

The "values of the Republic", inculcated from "la maternelle" through to university, in a manner that presupposes the all-pervading authority of the State and in a style that borders on indoctrination, have exacerbated an intensely held and un-deserved racial superiority in the Gallic mind. Plonking my identity card down to accompany my check (and that is the correct spelling, devoid of petit bourgeois English snobbery), I couldn't have a pair of trousers taken up by a local seamstress without her gratuitously pointing out "Je suis française, Monsieur!" Well, bully for you, Madame - suce-moi l'autre, je t'en prie...

I suppose that all countries are entitled - and some even deserve - their national myths. "La gloire de la France", however, can go take an historical rain check (correct spelling), because if they haven't noticed, we have - they ain't won a battle since Austerlitz. Not much glory in that - unless it's some sort of exotic recipe I managed not to taste.

And on the subject of national myths, when Michael Gorbachev's Perestroika was failing, it was current French opinion that "la République" was the Soviet Union that succeeded. Such are the ethical and moral depths to which those wedded to the concept of the "human laboratory" sink - but notably, never seemingly without trace.

The French Revolution might have emancipated the Jews but, just somehow, "l'égalité des races" didn't exactly get off the drawing board of this artificially reconstructed culture, and its subsequent, various and regular attempts at pseudo democracy haven't exactly furthered. For since the Revolution, each and every generation, all within living memory of the preceding generation, has had its anti-Semitic scandal - culminating in the deportations of the Second World War - each symptomatic of the underlying and ingrained anti-Semitism that lies at the heart of French society. Abolish religion, we are told, and there is an enexorable rise in superstition. Replace Catholic superstition with the cult of the State and superstition is then in the hands of the official ideologues with real political power. And the concept of the "wrong kind of Jew" and the "right kind of Jew" become political currency - devoid, in the French experience, of inflation.

This commemorative stamp represents the official, aspirational side of the "values of the Republic" to which only the establishment adhere in vain and cosmetic attempts to deny reality. Rabbi Jacob Kaplan - for now - is conveniently the right kind of Jew. It is an act of utter and complete cynicism to think that the vicissitudes of his life - mirroring those of many other Jewish victims of Gallic anti-Semitism - will be sufficient to make the Jews of France feel once more at home in their own country.