Introduction

In this concluding chapter, I bring together four issues that seem essential in looking back on this study. Firstly, I reflect on some uses and abuses of referring today to the memory of Jewish assimilation in 19th-century France. Secondly, I specify lessons that can be learned from reading Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time in the context of today's questions surrounding the position of ethnic and religious minorities in Europe. Thirdly, I briefly summarise why I problematise the secularism-religion framework instead of trying to define a ‘better’ laïcité. Fourthly, I address the question of what alternatives could be developed, and I reflect on the advantages and drawbacks of calling these alternatives ‘multicultural’ today.

The assimilation of the French Jews as a memory for today

About ten years ago, a strange episode aired on a local Amsterdam television channel. In a moment of inadvertence, the city councillor for education, Rob Oudkerk, was filmed talking with the mayor of Amsterdam, Job Cohen, under the impression that he was speaking off the record. The first was clearly heard saying ‘fucking Moroccans’ (kutmarokkanen), which has since become a notorious (and often repeated) phrase in the Netherlands. The immediate response of the mayor was to say, ‘but they are our fucking Moroccans’ (maar het zijn wel onze kutmarokkanen). Oudkerk's insensitive neologism must have taken a very short-circuited route through Cohen's mind, for his reply references a slogan reportedly conceived during World War ii, which held that the ‘stinking Nazis’ (rotmoffen) should keep their hands off ‘our stinking Jews’ (onze rotjoden).

Cohen's reaction exposes an important factor related to the incorporation of migrants into European societies, which is the memory of the fate of the European Jews in World War ii. Migrants not only bring their own memories, but they also arrive in a specific field of memories. The fate of the Jews, in particular, has left deep traces that influence present-day thinking about minorities in the European context in ways which are difficult to evaluate because they are not always explicit and result in highly diverse attitudes.

Over the last decades, a significant change has occurred with regard to the role of these memories. In the 1980s, at a demonstration against racism in France, it could still be written that ‘Jew = immigrant’ (juif = immigré), and campaigns against the discrimination of Muslims sometimes referred to the exclusion of the Jews.