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6. Racine and Anti-Semitism Surfing the net on the morning of June 2, I ran across a remark by an editor of the Israeli newspaper Haar’etz, who had been asked which non-Muslim country at the present time exhibited the most anti-Semitism. He had distinguished very carefully between criticism of the present Israeli government and anti-Semitism, insisting that the former by no means involved the latter. But when asked to make a choice, he mentioned France as the European country in which this age-old plague now seemed to have the strongest roots. He did not, however, refer to any specific incidents and brought in the Dreyfus case of the turn of the century in the course of his comments; he also added that France had a very large Muslim population. I was sitting in the south of France when I read these words, in the picturesque city of Collioure, located at the foot of the Pyrenees in Catalonia quite close to the Spanish border. It had been the haunt of Matisse, Derain, and a whole host of other then avant-garde painters including Picasso in the halcyon days before World War I. Collioure, its tumultuous history going back to Roman times, had once been under Spanish rule, and several years before I had noticed a little metal plaque on the walkway that ran along the side of the towering old wall, now part of the fortifications built by Vauban to guard the port. The plaque was placed underneath a sheet of metal perforated with holes and bent in a circular arc. A metal rod rising from the ground through one of the holes gave it the appearance of a sail and a mast. Written in both Catalan and French, the plaque informed the public that, from this very port, the last of the non-converted Jews in this region had set sail in 1493, giving all their names as well as that of the two ships on which they had embarked. This part of France also served as one of the escape routes used by predominantly Jewish refugees to reach Spain during the early years of the Vichy regime, all too eager to collaborate with the anti-Semitic Nazi conquerors . The refugees of course took back trails or pathways through the mountains, carefully reconnoitered in advance. If you drive along the winding coast road to the border at Port Bou, you come across the monument 78 Racine and Anti-Semitism 79 to Walter Benjamin, who swallowed poison when his party was initially refused entry into Spain. A day later admission was granted, too late to save the desperate writer who had earlier been imprisoned in France as a foreigner . The French relation to the Jews is thus a checkered one, but there is enough evidence in the memoirs to indicate that the officially anti-Semitic policies of Vichy were often countered by the local people. Thoughts such as these came to my mind, but what I recalled even more vividly was an evening at the Comédie Française in Paris that, just the week before, my wife and I had attended with some French friends. We had gone to see a performance of Racine’s play Esther, very rarely given and comparatively much less well-known than several others. Indeed, though I am a great admirer of Racine, and over the years had taken every opportunity to see him performed in Paris (sometimes with disastrous results when he got into the hands of avant-garde directors), I had never seen Esther announced and thus had not taken the trouble to read it in preparation for such a performance . Nonetheless, I of course knew the main outlines of the plot, taken from the Book of Esther in the Old Testament that is the origin of the Jewish holiday of Purim. What it depicts is the rescue of the Jewish people from the threat of genocide; and when I saw the advertisement for the play I could not help wondering whether the staging of Esther at this time was merely coincidental. Who can say? The Comédie Francaise, after all, is an institution of the French government. Esther is one of the two Biblical plays that Racine wrote (the other is Athalie) after he had officially retired from composing for the theatre, despite the success of such earlier masterpieces as Phèdre and Bérenice. Instead, he had assumed the post...

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