TenouaInterview28 January 2025
“Projection” with Guillaume Erner: the Jewish obsession
29 min
First episode of the “Projection” series: Delphine Horvilleur reverses the roles and, images in hand, interviews the morning voice of France Culture. Around “Judéobsessions” (Flammarion), published that very week: two mirror families of discreet French Judaism, the omnipresence of the word “Jew” in the news, the matrix of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and what brings you back to life. Recorded the day after the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In French.
“Rabbis usually don't much like images. The Shema Yisrael, the Jewish prayer, is really a story of hearing.”
“I was told several times this year: “My, how Jewish you have become!” Which is quite a funny thing to say to a rabbi.”
“On many occasions these past years I have said to myself, forgive the metaphor […] culinary and not very kosher: what are we doing in this choucroute?”
“The question is not so much whether these people are antisemitic; but you have to admit they are Jew-obsessed.”
“I wrote a play a few years ago. […] The character breathes and says: “A veritable protocol of the elders of breathing.” […] And I realise, hearing the play performed, that plenty of people don't get the joke.”
“In Yiddish there is an expression that says you must look, in life, for a mekhaye, what brings you back to life. There are moments when we are crushed by history or by darkness. We must look for what brings us back to life.”
The session
The series' device is set from this first episode: images as triggers. The conversation starts from two mirror families: a discreet French-Israelite Judaism, as bland as Ashkenazi cooking, very French, very much of the left, whose end Guillaume Erner dates. He recounts his October 7: an uncle under the rockets twenty kilometres from Sderot, and the first time in twenty years of journalism that he was told he spoke “as a Jew.” Then come the images of the Jewish obsession: Attali as Macron's puppeteer in a drawing from the gilets jaunes marches, which the courts declined to qualify; the “Nazi pass” hurled at Agnès Buzyn; the Nazi Zionism banner brandished at the release of the hostages. Erner reads in them a medieval topos whose matrix remains the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery from 1903 and the only document annexed to the Hamas charter; he unrolls the Soviet genealogy of anti-Zionist vocabulary, the “perverse apparatus” described by Nathalie Heinich, and his book's two new words: the normcore Jew, become “terribly normal” and filed on the side of power, and the Judeocene, after Andreas Malm. The episode closes on a Yiddish question and an answer by way of Amos Oz, the day after the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.