France and the shoah

[yankeedoodle]

In the United States of America, the crazed prophecies of the Israeli leader find support from an American variant of Judeo-Christianity, more Judeo than Christian, whose followers are taught to believe that gentle Jesus will zoom back to earth as a murderous Avenger while his faithful float up to heaven.

France & the Shoah

Skeptical France is very far from such fantasies. French support to Israel is longstanding and political, but tinged with semi-religious devotion rooted in recent history.

France is officially, even ostentatiously, a secular nation, considerably de-christianized over the past two hundred years.

To a unique extent, over the past half century, this religious void has been filled by the sacred remembrance of the Shoah, as the Holocaust is usually called here.

It all began in 1954 when 27-year-old Jewish journalist named Eliezer Wiesel met the 70-year-old Catholic novelist François Mauriac in Paris.

Mauriac was deeply moved by Wiesel's "resurrection" from his experience as a prisoner in Auschwitz, seeing him as a Christ figure. For Mauriac, the sacrifice of the Jews recalled the Crucifixion of Jesus.

With help from the prominent French writer, Wiesel transformed his copious Yiddish notes into a French memoir, La Nuit (Night), the testimony that transformed him into a major spiritual figure of the post-World War II era.

It was Mauriac, the devout Christian, who saw in Wiesel and his people the parallels with Christianity, which as the Shoah was destined to take on the attributes of a state religion in France as memories of the Nazi occupation were transformed into sacred myth.

The foregoing is excerpted from this much longer Consortium News article:
DIANA JOHNSTONE: Genocide Meets French Devotion to Israel
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/02/11/diana-johnstone-genocide-meets-french-devotion-to-israel/