Review of La civilisation judéo-chrétienne: Anatomie d'une imposture
Sophie Bessis, La civilisation judéo-chrétienne: Anatomie d'une imposture (Les liens qui libèrent, 2025).
Judeo-Christian Civilization: Sophie Bessis on a French Fraud
Jessica M. Marglin
“Civilization against barbarity”
In June 2024, Binyamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, asked the people of France for their support of Israel’s war in Gaza. Netanyahu told the French that “our victory is your victory,” explaining that an Israeli triumph in Gaza would be a “victory of Judeo-Christian civilization against barbarity.”
For Sophie Bessis, a well-known Franco-Tunisian historian and public intellectual, Netanyahu’s invocation of Judeo-Christian civilization hit a nerve. Her latest book, Judeo-Christian Civilization: Analysis of a Fraud, deconstructs Netanyahu’s premise of a shared Jewish and Christian culture. Her perspective is one rarely heard in the United States—offering insight into prejudice on both sides of the Mediterranean, as seen from a self-identifying Arab Jew.
The Fraud
Bessis is not the first to offer a critique of “Judeo-Christian” as a post-WWII construct with a disturbing backstory. The phrase initially became common in the United States during the Cold War as a way to fight godless communism and embrace American religiosity. In the French context, the rise of a Judeo-Christian civilizational discourse is a way for European Christians to whitewash the Shoah. “After the Second World War, after the cogs of the Nazi extermination machine were gradually brought to light, Europe—and more broadly, the West—had to restore its ‘values’” (28).
The French right is working the hardest to shake the stigma of antisemitism. Until his death last year, Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the Front National, was both the public face of the far right and a reminder of its entrenched antisemitism. More recently, Le Pen’s daughter and successor Marine Le Pen has tried to remake the far right in a shinier, non-antisemitic light. She expelled her father from the party and renamed it the Rassemblement National (RN, National Rally). Increasingly, and especially since 7 October, the RN has painted itself as the champion of French Jews, the only ones who will protect them against the “Islamo-leftists” (islamo-gauchistes) who, they claim, are not only virulently anti-Israel but dangerously antisemitic.
To a large extent, Marine Le Pen has succeeded. Many Jews and non-Jews alike were horrified when Serge Klarsfeld, a prominent scholar of the Holocaust and hunter of Nazis, announced he was voting for the RN in the snap elections of July 2024. The RN is part of a global trend of far-right parties who claim to the charge against antisemitism and in defense of Israel.
In Bessis’s view, the problem goes well beyond the far right. She sees Judeo-Christian everywhere: “One writes about the economy? It is referenced. On culture? Citing it is obligatory”—explaining that mentions of Judeo-Christian civilization “are so numerous that whoever begins to pay attention can only observe its omnipresence” (10). It is precisely the ubiquity with which Judeo-Christian appears in French discourse that drove Bessis to “deconstruct” what she labels an “alternative truth.”
A European Expulsion Machine
Perhaps most importantly, Judeo-Christian is a way of placing Muslims outside the civilizational pale—an “expulsion machine” masquerading as tolerance. To describe France as a bastion of Judeo-Christian civilization is to tell Muslims that they are not part of the real France. This is particularly shocking in France, with the largest population of Muslims in Europe. (France is also home to Europe’s largest population of Jews.)
The French right does not have a monopoly on Islamophobia. Bessis points out that hardly a week goes by without a major French publication running a feature article on a violent strain of Islam. Not every such article is explicitly Islamophobic, but the collective effect suggests French society’s obsession with the supposed un-assimilability of Muslims.
And of course, French law has targeted Islamic observance in the past two decades. The 2004 law banning the veil in schools and other public institutions was only the beginning of restrictions designed to prevent overtly religious expressions in the public sphere. These are supposedly aimed at all religions, but it is widely understood that the law was about hijabs. Subsequent legislation, such as the 2024 law against wearing the abaya (a long robe deemed explicitly religious) in schools, lay bare the true aim of this legislation.
In the United States, anti-Muslim prejudice remains rampant in MAGA circles. I thought the absurd claim that Muslims were trying to impose “sharia law” on Americans had been relegated to its deserved place in the rubbish bin of history after 2020. Unfortunately, this specific fear-mongering is alive and well, as evident in Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s naming the Council on American-Islamic Relations a “foreign terrorist organization” last November, in part for supposedly aiming to impose sharia law.
Prejudice against Muslims—especially Arabs—may run even deeper in the French right. There is a direct link between those who mourned the end of French empire in North Africa, anti-Arab racism, and French support for the state of Israel. During the Algerian war of independence (1954-1962), far-right settlers in Algeria formed the Organisation armée secrète (OAS) in 1961 as a paramilitary organization that used terrorist tactics to keep Algeria part of France. After Algerian independence, former members of the OAS like Pierre Sergent entered politics on explicitly pro-Israel platforms. As a colleague once put it to me, the connection is obvious: the OAS was anti-Arab, and so were Israelis.
An Islamic Expulsion Machine
So far, Bessis’s critique is unsurprising to anyone familiar with the French political scene. But unlike many critics in the United States, Bessis is unafraid to train her critical gaze on the use of Judeo-Christian civilization in the Middle East and North Africa. She argues that Judeo-Christian has become an “expulsion machine” on both sides of the Mediterranean.
Her first target are Islamists: “From Iran to Morocco, all aspects of the Islamist galaxy have made unbridled use of [Judeo-Christian] for decades. The ‘Judeo-Christian’ is the enemy whose formidable power is entirely devoted to weakening Islam, the last and most perfect of prophecies whose sole vocation is to rule the world.” This “anti-Western” discourse is particularly aimed at Israel, which Islamists view as the “most scandalous example” of “a Judeo-Christian conspiracy” (62).
Bessis passes over Islamist conspiracy theorists rather swiftly, pivoting to a discussion of Christian support for Zionism from the nineteenth century to the present. She points out that Christian antisemitism has fit hand-in-glove with Zionism for over a century, such as British statesman Arthur Balfour’s “desire to facilitate Jewish colonization in Palestine” (65). Bessis draws a direct line between the Balfour Declaration and the “modern rise to power of Protestant evangelical movements” in which “biblical philo-semitism” and support for Zionism coexists with a messianic belief that the “return of all Jews to the Holy Land, where they will be collectively converted to Christianity, is a necessary step to the second coming of Jesus on earth” (65-66).
Finally, Bessis turns to the ways Muslims in the MENA use the idea of Judeo-Christian civilization: as a convenient way to deny the religious diversity of the Islamic world. In their telling, Jews (and to some degree Christians) never belonged. And while Zionist organizations helped convince many Jews to leave, the Arab nationalism of post-colonial states is also to blame:
If [the Jewish Agency] had not encountered the desire to get rid of [Jews] on the part of these newly independent states—now governed by nationalist regimes in which Islam and/or Arabness constituted the bedrock of their identity—then these departures would probably have only concerned a minority of “Arab Jews”....(68-9)
Bessis makes it clear that Jews’ decision to leave was not entirely the result of a Zionist plot—a position that has considerable traction in certain corners of the Jewish left. In the course of our conversations in Paris and Tunis, she often emphasized that “Jews and Muslims did not kiss one another on the lips every morning”—poking fun at those who would paint a too rosy picture of Jewish-Muslim relations pre-Zionism.
The departure of Jews from North Africa and the Middle East is something Bessis lived. After Tunisian independence in 1956, Bessis’s parents planned to stay; both were deeply rooted in the country and had no desire to leave. But her father Aldo, an agricultural engineer, was soon told that Jews could never advance in the government, that he could never have a real career in Tunisia. So they left. Bessis herself intended to return to an academic position in Tunisia after completing her doctorate in France. Despite her stellar credentials, no Tunisian university would hire her. No one had to say out loud that they would not hire a Jew.
In describing the West as Judeo-Christian, Muslims erase the memory of their Jews—a form of “state antisemitism” Bessis finds particularly abhorrent. She castigates the Algerian government for arresting the author of a book about Jews in 2024, accusing her of “apology for Zionism” (70).
Antisemitism, Left and Right
Although Bessis does not frame her book as a response to debates about antisemitism in France today, this is an important part of the political context in which she writes. As in the United States, the French left has been alarmed at the ways in which the right has succeeded in branding itself as the only ones capable of fighting antisemitism. For instance, Collectif Golem was born during a massive demonstration against antisemitism in November 2023. These leftist Jews publicly protested the far-right RN’s participation in the march and attempted to block their members from joining.
In refusing to let the right claim the mantle of champions of the Jews, Bessis is fighting an uphill battle. The political mainstream has essentially ceded to the right in identifying antisemitism as primarily a problem on the far left. On 13 February 2026, President Emmanuel Macron gave a speech commemorating twenty years since Ilan Halimi, a French Jew from Paris, was kidnapped, tortured, and finally murdered by a gang calling themselves “The Barbarians.”
In his address, Macron decried antisemitism in France and across the globe. But the version of antisemitism he gave was one that existed almost entirely on the left. He began by denouncing “Islamic antisemitism—which,” he claimed, “was behind the pogrom of October 7.” He also denounced antisemitism “that uses the mask of anti-Zionism” to deny the state of Israel the right to exist, thereby “ultimately denying Jews the right to live.” And he decried the “antisemitism of the far left...which rivals the far right regarding cliches about power and wealth.”
During the fifteen minutes in which Macron spoke about the evils of antisemitism, he mentioned the far right only once. Had aliens landed on earth and attended this ceremony, they would probably conclude that the only antisemitism to worry about came from Islamists, anti-Zionists, and the far left.
Bessis does not frame her book as a commentary on the politics of antisemitism in France. Yet the background of her critique is a country that seems to have forgotten the far right’s history of antisemitism. In the wake of Macron’s remarks—and considering general sentiment that the RN may very well take the presidency in the next elections—Bessis’s critique seems more urgent than ever.
Writing as an Arabjew
Bessis began writing explicitly about Jewish matters and her own Jewishness only recently. She began life with an awareness that she was Jewish, but little interest in what that might mean. She was communist like her parents, proudly Arab and Tunisian even after she made her career in France, and fiercely secular.
In a memoir she published in 2010, Bessis first described herself as an “Arabjew” (juivearabe), a portmanteau of her own creation. Arab Jew is the more familiar version, especially in the anglophone world. But “Arabjew” is not quite the same thing. Bessis refuses to turn Arab into an adjective that modifies what is essential, “Jew.” Nor does she simply invert the terms, making Arab into an essence that is modified by Jew. She feels equally both.
After the Jasmine Revolution in 2011, Bessis wrote more frequently and more openly about the Jewish half of her Arabjewish identity. In 2021, in the midst of the pandemic, she wrote an epistolary memoir in the form of a letter to Hannah Arendt, in which she openly grapples with the ways Mizrahi Jews have been written out of Jewish history.
There is no doubt that Bessis wrote Judeo-Christian Civilization in part as a response to 7 October, especially after Netanyahu’s appeal to the fight for “Judeo-Christian civilization” against “barbarism.” In her words, Israel’s adoption of “the Judeo-Christian concept, long marginal for Jews,” is evidence that the state has entered “the galaxy of countries governed by regimes that adopt an ethnoreligious racism as an identitarian foundation” (82).
Yet Bessis does not write primarily as a Jew. On the contrary, she is committed to universalism, a term she invokes frequently, and is fiercely critical of any politics that abandons the value of universalism. Bessis is convinced that the answer to antisemitism, Islamophobia, and all other kinds of prejudice is a better version of universalism. Her staunch commitment to universalism is particularly refreshing in an American climate that so easily descends into identitarian politics. She certainly has something to teach us—not just about France or the Middle East and North Africa, but about how we engage with difference anywhere in the world.