Elif Kayi, Z Word’s European Press Reviewer, summarizes a vexed debate in France.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s recent announcement that, from the beginning of the next school year, all ten year old children will be “entrusted” with the memory of one of the 11,000 French Jewish children murdered during the Holocaust, has provoked a firestorm of debate in the French press. One of the key controversies concerns what some commentators have described as “victim competition” - in other words, that commemorating only the Jewish victims somehow lessens the worth of non-Jewish ones.

As a result, the debate about how to appropriately remember history has become caught up in France’s torrid exchange about contemporary antisemitism and its relationship to other forms of racism.

Sarkozy has his vocal supporters, among them the Nazi hunter and lawyer Serge Klarsfeld, who argued that the initiative would assist ” the posthumous survival” of the Jewish children while enabling “the moral and civic formation” of the current generation.

Simone Veil, President of the Shoah Memorial Foundation, took an opposing view. Speaking to L’Express, she declared Sarkozy’s proposal “inconceivable, unbearable and especially unfair. One cannot inflict this on ten year-old children! One cannot ask a child to identify with a dead child. This memory is far too heavy to carry.”

Emmanuelle Mignon, Sarkozy’s Chief of Staff, was adamant that the proposal was firmly fixed on present concerns. “Everyone recognises the Shoah as the absolute racist crime,” she told Le Journal du Dimanche. “It is therefore logical to use education about the Shoah as a tool for fighting against racism in all its forms, and not just antisemitism…The prejudice which people of immigrant background are facing today has the same origin as the crimes suffered by the Jews: the beast of racism.”

Regis Debray, one of France’s leading left-wing philosophers, disagreed so strongly that he wrote a statement of opposition which quickly gained 15,000 signatures. Carried in the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, the statement said that the effect of the proposal had been a “catastrophe” which was causing a “woeful competition” between victims.

Debray’s position was echoed by MRAP, the anti-racist organization, which condemned the proposal for encouraging “victimhood competition.” MRAP underlined its “deep unease towards what constitutes an unbearable ‘selective separation’ of memories, as the gypsy victims of the Nazi extermination are once more ignored by the state.” A similar point was made by the historian Esther Benbassa, who asked: “Will we have to carry tomorrow the name of a colonised, an Armenian, a migrant?”

Alongside fears of unhealthy clashes over victimhood was the sense - as expressed by the Holocaust historian Georges Bensoussan, among others - that Jewish history would be set in stone as only being about victimhood. And in an article for Liberation, Barbara Lefebvre, a teacher, and Shmuel Trigano, an academic, warned that the proposal would lead to simpilistic polarization of how Jews are perceived: “…either a victim (the Dreyfus affair and the Shoah), or a torturer (the Arab-Israeli conflict).”

Of course, the debate would have been incomplete without an antisemitic dig somewhere along the line. This was provided by the weekly magazine Marianne, which, in the course of portraying Holocaust commemoration as an unwelcome burden, asked rhetorically: “Are we, since the President speaks in our name, eternally in debt without knowing it, without deserving it?”

One assumes that the “we” being referred to here does not include French Jews, since the Marianne piece insists that the only reason the whole proposal is in the public domain is because the state feels an “obligation” to French Jewish organizations.