Antisemitism Monitor | Week of May 22, 2023

Houria Bouteldja, the French-Algerian author of Whites, Jews, and Us, whose views about the status of Jews in France have sparked controversy, spoke at Yale in April despite protests from students and alumni.

Bouteldja is best known for cofounding the Party of the Indigenous of the Republic (PIR), a social movement that mobilized in 2005 and consolidated into a political party by 2010. According to Bouteldja, PIR is the “decolonial organization in France led by postcolonial activists who live mainly in vulnerable, disadvantaged, poor neighborhoods in France.” Bouteldja has also posed with a sign demanding to send Zionists to gulags and empathized with Mohammed Merah, an Islamic jihadist who murdered a rabbi and three children in a mass shooting at a Jewish day school in Toulouse, France.

Fatima El-Tayeb, a professor of ethnicity, race and migration and of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Yale, invited the political activist to participate in a “Decolonizing Europe” lecture series.  The lecture took place on the second night of Passover despite requests to Yale President Peter Salovey from students, alumni and the national watchdog group StopAntisemitism to cancel or at least reschedule the event. According to StopAntisemitism, the timing of Bouteldja’s lecture made it impossible to have an open dialogue as many Jewish students were unable to attend. Uri Cohen, the executive director of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale, expressed similar sentiments and said that the timing silenced students’ voices and “disenfranchised many potential protesters.” 

During her lecture, “France and Whiteness: breaking with the collaboration of race,” Bouteldja outlined her analysis of France’s “racial pact,” which claims that a group’s proximity to whiteness correlates to its social mobility. Because Jews can pass as white more often than France’s North African population, Boutija says, they have been more able to rise through the country’s class structure. Bouteldja’s critics take issue with this claim, saying it disregards centuries of European antisemitic incidents such as the Dreyfus affair, which denied French Jews’ claim to whiteness (or even “Frenchness”).

Although Bouteldja avoided explicit references to Jews during her lecture, the term “racial pact” can be traced back to her 2016 book, Whites, Jews, and Us. In the book, she classifies French Jews as dhimmis, an Arabic term used to describe non-Muslims whose protection and religious tolerance were contingent on paying taxes to the caliphs or sultan. Bouteldja draws parallels between contemporary French Jews and medieval dhimmis, arguing that they both accepted “racial pacts” and enjoyed privileged statuses denied to other minorities. 

At the end of the lecture, El-Tayeb dismissed questions about Bouteldja’s history of antisemitic behavior, calling them a “waste of time.”