Eric Zemmour, or the Nationalization of Anti-Judaism

It had vanished long ago, and no one missed it. That old strain of Catholic anti-Judaism, presumed buried in history, resurfaces in Éric Zemmour’s latest pamphlet, La messe n’est pas dite (The Mass Is Not Over), now reborn in a secular and nationalist form. Gabriel Abensour places Zemmour’s rhetoric back within this atavistic tradition, while probing the deep paradox of its author: what does a “foreign Jew” hope to achieve by aligning himself with the legacy of France’s identitarian Catholic far right?

 

 

Introduction

I have read Eric Zemmour’s La Messe n’est pas dite and listened to his recent media appearances. There are many possible angles from which to approach his pamphlet and broader discourse, but in this article, I will focus on the roots of Zemmour’s worldview in anti-Judaism. By anti-Judaism, I do not mean antisemitism in the racial or biological sense that the 19th century solidified under that label, but rather in the theological and structural sense, as analyzed by historian David Nirenberg and others.

While I understand and share the dismay of French Jews at the normalization of a party as passionately antisemitic as La France Insoumise (LFI, a far-left political party), I believe that the anti-Judaic passions at the heart of Zemmour’s project, and the fascination he inspires in parts of the right, should also raise alarm. In my view, Jews cannot afford the luxury of fearing only one threat, nor of placing their trust in self-proclaimed opportunistic saviors.

As we will see, Zemmour nationalizes traditionalist Christian theology and, in doing so, reactivates long-standing anti-Judaic tropes: supersessionism (the “theology of replacement”), the caricature of the legalistic Jew, the blind Jew who refuses the light of the Church, or the rebellious Jew. Zemmour’s innovation lies in offering a nationalist secularization of these theological-political concepts. The issue is no longer belief in Christ, but submission to a transcendent-free Identitarian Church, a Church defined by civilization, not salvation. The “blind Jew” is no longer the one who denies the divinity of the Messiah, but the one who refuses to recognize the identitarian Catholic order as the civilizational order.

Zemmour knows that only a “Jewish métèque”, to paraphrase his own quoting of Maurras, could reopen the cursed pantheon of Action Française and its thinkers

From the very first lines of his book, Zemmour leans heavily on his own Jewishness. Implicitly, he knows that only a “Jewish métèque” (a loaded French term for a foreigner, often with racial undertones)—to paraphrase his own quoting of Maurras—could reopen the cursed pantheon of Action Française^[1]and its thinkers, all anathematized after the Shoah. It is in the name of his Jewishness that Zemmour seeks to reconcile France with its historical anti-Judaism, made infamous first by the Revolution, then by the collapse of the Vichy regime. Ever the conciliator, Zemmour still offers non-Catholics, and especially Jews and Muslims, a way to avoid expulsion or “remigration”: by accepting a kind of identitarian neo-baptism. This implies total and unreserved assimilation, not into the secular, universalist Republic, but into the eternal, Catholic France.

Jews Who Are Too Jewish: On the Anti-Judaism at the Core of Éric Zemmour’s Discourse

One of the guiding threads of La Messe n’est pas dite is Zemmour’s embrace of a linear, hierarchical vision of history, deeply rooted in Christian tradition. It stems from Paul, was transmitted through the Western ecclesial heritage, and resurfaces—hardly modified—in thinkers like Ernest Renan (1823-1892), on whom Zemmour heavily relies. According to this view, Judaism is a necessary but incomplete first stage: an early covenant still bound to the flesh and to the letter of the law, which Christianity comes to fulfill. Christianity is the higher form of Judaism, its revealed truth. 

Zemmour fully adopts this narrative. He insists that Jesus was, first and foremost, a Jew, and belonged to a lineage of Israelite prophets “who never ceased to scold and insult their people, mocking their archaic sacrifices that imagined God a sybarite, while the God of Israel demanded of His ‘children’ that they become better, more just, more honest, more virtuous.” In this telling, Jesus becomes the last great Jewish prophet, the one who sought to free Israel from its overly carnal attachment to the Law and to “elevate it spiritually.” In short, we find here the old Pauline opposition between letter and spirit, whereas Jewish tradition has always held both together: the demand of the letter and the inner life of the spirit.

The Christian temporality Zemmour adopts is far from the only possible one. Jewish tradition offers a radical counter-narrative, one in which the order of precedence is reversed. In rabbinic Judaism, the lineage between Jews and Christians is neither self-evident nor unambiguous. In the Midrash, the Kabbalah, and medieval exegesis, Christianity is identified with Esau, the older brother of Jacob. Esau is the one born first but who sells his birthright, the one who is red, attached to meat, to force, to blood, a carnal and violent figure symbolically associated with Edom, Rome, and later, Christendom. Jacob, by contrast, is the younger brother—apparently weaker, but wiser and more spiritual—the one who inherits the blessing and the legacy. Where medieval Christian tradition saw Jews as Esau, as retrograde firstborns refusing to acknowledge the truth of the second, Jewish tradition flips the order: Christendom is Esau, the one who did indeed found an empire, but only by renouncing the covenant. This reversal of the narrative shows that religious and historical temporality is not fixed. Being first does not, in itself, establish legitimacy.

The “blind Jew” is no longer the one who denies the divinity of the Messiah, but the one who refuses to recognize the identitarian Catholic order as the civilizational order.

There is also a critical historical reading, notably that of Israel Jacob Yuval, arguably one of the foremost historians of medieval Jewish-Christian relations. In his pioneering work, Yuval argued that Christianity and rabbinic Judaism are rival twins, both born of the same biblical root, each constructing its identity in mirrored opposition to the other.

Thus, the metaphor cherished by Pope John Paul II, and echoed by Zemmour, that Jews are the “elder brothers” of Christians is itself a Christian framing of history. It assigns Jews a preparatory role, frozen in a past anteriority, one that has already been surpassed. Yet while John Paul II, following the path laid by Nostra Aetate and the Second Vatican Council, sought to reconcile the Church with the Jewish people and to break with the old logic of replacement theology, Zemmour instead prefers to reactivate it. He goes so far as to describe Vatican II and its reforms as a “historical and ideological misreading,” accusing the Church of having, out of “moral elegance and evangelical softness,” taken responsibility for antisemitic sins that, in his view, it need not have atoned for.

In an absurd passage, Zemmour even proposes a nationalist and identitarian version of the verus Israel theology, the very one the Catholic Church had officially abandoned after the Shoah: “Since Constantine, Christendom has ruled the Roman Empire. It claims to be the verus Israel, the true Israel, the new chosen people… Of all the successors of the Roman Empire, the French monarchy best understood this prophecy. The king of France saw himself as the descendant of King David. The French people are the new chosen people… Through the rite of coronation, the king of the Franks inherits from King David; he is God’s chosen one. A sacred land is promised to this people of God: France.”

What Zemmour offers here is an explicit revival of the Christian scheme of substitution, in which Jews are only acceptable if they accept being surpassed, if they recognize themselves merely as forerunners but never as bearers of a truth of their own.

From Religious Denial to Modern Blindness: The Jewish Intelligentsia Against the Church

In both his media appearances and La Messe n’est pas dite, Éric Zemmour regularly returns to the question of faith. “Faith taking precedence over Law was the great transgression, the great revolution that brought glory to Christianity,” he writes. According to him, this decisive rupture allowed Christianity to transcend the ritual rigidity of Judaism and to achieve a genuine spiritual revolution. But the Jews, never having recognized the divine nature of Christ, remained on the margins of this elevation, trapped in rigid orthopraxy and an excessive attachment to the letter of the law. This revives an old theological schema: Jews are not condemned for their origins, but for their refusal, or inability, to shift from “orthopraxy (a religion based on observance of the Law, such as Judaism) to orthodoxy (a religion grounded in faith).”

What Zemmour proposes to French Jews and Muslims is to become identitarian Catholics of Semitic descent

What distinguishes Zemmour’s discourse from classical anti-Judaism, however, is the nature of the solution he proposes. If secularization had one advantage in the eyes of this reactionary polemicist, it was that it made it possible to be identitarianly Christian without actually believing, so long as one adheres to the Church as a civilizational order. “I stand with the Church and against Jesus,” Zemmour once declared, though he later felt the need to offer a sheepish apology on the set of the far-right media Frontières, after realizing that this latest provocation had displeased his identitarian Catholic allies. No matter. What he abhors is not Jesus in himself, but the figure of the gentle, charitable, universalist prophet, in short, the Jesus of the Gospels. In contrast, he openly embraces the Jesus of the Crusades and the Reconquista, filtered through the writings of Charles Maurras and far-right mythologies. This is the Christ he claims: virile, militant, and national. In this vision, the Hebrew “national religion” of biblical times becomes the elder sister, of course less accomplished, of the Christian European nation-state.

Zemmour thus presents himself as the self-declared apostle of this Identitarian Church, liberated from both the demands and the limitations that faith imposes on believers. This is the core of his political project, one that is bound to offend any sincere believer, whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim. The old model of conversion becomes a model of identitarian incorporation. Jews, Protestants, and Muslims are all expected to become identitarian Catholics, even if Zemmour grants them the right to retain their personal, private beliefs. In essence, what Zemmour proposes to French Jews and Muslims is to become identitarian Catholics of Semitic descent. His nationalized Church lacks even the meager tolerance of the medieval Church, which, for all its faults, at least tolerated the presence of obstinate and blind Jews in its midst. Those who refuse this model, Zemmour declares while paraphrasing the revolutionary deputy Clermont-Tonnerre, should be cast out. And he adds on the Frontières set: casting them out “today means remigration.”

Having nationalized Christian identity, Zemmour also nationalizes the old trope of the blind Jew. Long accused in Christian tradition of stubbornly rejecting Christ, Jews are now, in his narrative, accused of stubbornly rejecting the order represented by the Identitarian Church. The object of his critique is no longer Judaism as a whole, but its institutional and intellectual representatives, especially the “left-wing” Jewish intelligentsia and official Jewish institutions, from the Chief Rabbi to the CRIF (Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions), whom he accuses of having waged a century-long campaign against the Christian foundations of France. He blames them for supporting the 1905 separation of Church and State, through alliances with Protestants, and later for backing immigration policies and anti-racist discourse, forging, in the 1970s and 1980s, a new alliance with Muslims.

Zemmour accuses left-wing Jews of having exploited Holocaust memory to shame the West, undermine the nation, and open the door to postcolonial immigration.

According to him, this alliance worked to dismantle Catholic France, which he sees as the only true France. In this logic, Muslims act from within to weaken French society and seize control, while Jews, once again, blind themselves, unable to understand that by attacking the Church, they were undermining the only order truly capable of bringing them civilizational elevation.

Speaking on the sets of Pascal Praud and Frontières, Zemmour goes even further, accusing left-wing Jews of having exploited Holocaust memory to shame the West, undermine the nation, and open the door to postcolonial immigration. If the far left had often accused Jews of using the Shoah to silence criticism of Israel, Zemmour flips the script with a far-right version: Jews turning their historical trauma into a tool for national demoralization and decline. This, too, echoes an old narrative—one that casts Jews as internal enemies, carriers of a corrosive universalism incompatible with the logic of the nation-state. For the faithful, Jews were once deicides. In Zemmour’s framework, they become francocides: not guilty of killing Christ, but of contributing to the downfall of Catholic France, the only France that counts in his view. A France he already considers dead, as he states plainly, grounding his political vision in the hope of a “resurrection after death.” It is the final gesture in his nationalist rewriting of Christian theology.

Between Two Frances, Neither Home

At the heart of Zemmour’s discourse lies a fundamental and parricidal paradox. On one hand, he never tires of denouncing the French Revolution, the dechristianization of France, the birth of the Republic, secularism, the separation of Church and State, everything he sees as part of a long process of desacralization and civilizational decline. He cites with reverence the arch-reactionary Joseph de Maistre, mourns the fall of the monarchy, and attacks the Enlightenment and its universalist ideals.

But on the other hand, Zemmour is fully aware that everything he is, everything that enables him to speak today in the name of France, stems from this very process he so bitterly condemns. Without the Enlightenment, he would not be a French citizen. Without secularism, he would not be able to present himself as a Christian by identity while remaining Jewish by confession. Without the militant, secular Third Republic—and without the commitment of the “leftist Jew” Crémieux, Republican and universalist—his ancestors, and Zemmour himself, would never have become French. They would have remained “indigenous” subjects of the Kingdom of France, colonized in 1830 by Charles X, the last Bourbon king, Catholic and fiercely anti-revolutionary.

Zemmour thus embodies, despite himself, the offspring of an order he detests and now seeks to overturn. Even as he constantly chastises immigrant populations for their supposed ingratitude toward their host country, his own project is rooted in a profound intellectual ingratitude toward the republican, secular, and universalist values that made Jews, and more specifically his own ancestors, fully French. What if the France he admires, that of monarchists, counter-revolutionaries, and reactionary Catholics, never wanted him to begin with?

Zemmour tells the French far right that their mistake was not hating Jews, but failing to distinguish between the good ones and the bad ones, between the assimilated Jew and the cosmopolitan traitor. 

This paradox runs through all of Zemmour’s work, but it reaches a tragic and almost pathetic impasse in his relationship with the thinkers he tries to rehabilitate. Zemmour cites Maurras and Barrès, trying either to absolve their virulent antisemitism or at least recontextualize it. “All defenders of the Church’s influence and of a traditional France denounced, along with Charles Maurras, the ‘anti-France’ composed of ‘the four confederate states: Jew, Protestant, Freemason, métèque,'” he writes. Embodying, however reluctantly, two of those four reviled categories, Zemmour still claims pride in having reconciled France’s ultra-nationalists with certain Jews. Namely, the “good Jews”, those who, unlike universalist and progressive Jews, had always shown loyalty to the nation and were ready to take up arms against its enemies.

What Zemmour is truly attempting is an act of ideological whitewashing: telling the French far right that their mistake was not hating Jews, but failing to distinguish between the good ones and the bad ones, between the assimilated Jew and the cosmopolitan traitor. It is a doomed endeavor, because what Maurras despised was not Jewish ideology, but the simple existence of Jews within the body of the nation.

This strategy is an old illusion, that of the “exception Jew,” as described by Hannah Arendt, who thought he might escape antisemitic hatred by siding with the antisemites against his own. How can one not recall with sadness those Jews in 1930s Germany who tried to gain favor with the Nazis by distancing themselves from the Ostjuden, viewed as primitive and uncivilized? Or those French Jews who wrote to the Commissariat-General for Jewish Affairs under Vichy, pleading that there was a “great difference between old French Israelite families and the Jews who came from Poland and elsewhere”? These efforts are always in vain. An antisemitism rooted in identity logic never separates a Jew’s ideas from what a Jew is.

One remembers the far-right quip from those years: when a Jew is baptized, it adds one more Christian, but not one less Jew.

What Maurras and his heirs loathe is not what Zemmour thinks, but the fact that he remains, in their eyes, a foreign body in the national narrative. Raymond Aron understood this well when he stood against fellow Jewish intellectuals—just as “de-Judaized” as he claimed to be—who, following De Gaulle’s hostile remarks in 1967, attempted to shift the blame onto the “bad Jews,” those deemed indecent and ostentatious: namely, the Jews from North Africa, as opposed to the assimilated and loyal Israelites. If Maurras fought to repeal the Crémieux Decree, it was not because he feared Algerian Jews might lean too far left, but because no Jew, not even one on the far right, could ever truly be French in his eyes. One remembers the far-right quip from those years: when a Jew is baptized, it adds one more Christian, but not one less Jew.

A Horizon of Total War

Though La messe n’est pas dite tries to present itself as a civilizational awakening, one would be naïve not to read the deeper danger it conceals. What Zemmour proposes is not a debate, nor even a metaphorical cultural reconquest. It is a genuine call to war, grounded in a glorified and blood-soaked vision of history. In both his writing and television appearances, he invokes a violent imaginary, and the references he draws from leave little doubt as to the nature of what he is calling for.

In his book, Zemmour praises the Crusades of Pope Urban II: “It was the crusade launched by Pope Urban II that saved the West from the Islamic threat.” These armed expeditions, supposedly meant to liberate Christ’s tomb, massacred thousands of Jews in the Rhineland along the way, pogroms that are still mourned each year in the Ashkenazi prayers of Tisha BeAv. On the TV show Frontières, Zemmour proudly affirms the lineage between his movement Reconquête and the Spanish Reconquista—a centuries-long war against Muslims, but also against Jews, who posed no political threat. The Reconquista culminated in the expulsion of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, forced conversions, public burnings, and the Inquisition.

And on RMC, he confides that as a child, he identified France with the imposing red figure of Cardinal Richelieu, as painted by Henri Motte before the Siege of La Rochelle, in other words, with the man who orchestrated the brutal crushing of the Protestants.

Zemmour’s pamphlet calls for regeneration through erasure. In his France, only those who submit to the triumphant Identitarian Church are meant to survive.

These three references—Crusades, Reconquista, and the Siege of La Rochelle—share a common thread: each designates the enemy as an internal one to be eliminated through war, conversion, or expulsion. They each spilled blood in the name of unity. And they each targeted not only those seen, rightly or wrongly, as political usurpers, but also the exilic and traditional Jews, who never claimed any political dominion but simply wished to live out their Judaism freely.

Zemmour, paradoxically, belongs to the very community in France that has preserved living liturgical memory of these tragedies he now glorifies. On Tisha BeAv, Ashkenazi communities across France still recite the harrowing chronicles of the massacres committed by the armies who answered Urban II’s call. Sephardic communities, for their part, chant heartbreaking kinot (lamentations) describing how, under orders from Isabella the Catholic and Manuel I of Portugal, Jewish children were torn from their parents’ arms, baptized by force, and taken to monasteries. Parents, stripped of choice, were invited to accept baptism “freely” if they wished to retain even minimal visitation rights.

Must these texts now be banned because they contradict the great national narrative of a France founded on individual dignity? Should we now claim that those massacred Jews were themselves blind, and that their forcibly baptized children ought to thank the Church for opening to them the world of light and civilization?

This is the historical lineage Zemmour openly embraces. When he declares that “only Muslims who accept this iron law can stay with us; the others must go home: to live under Islamic law in all its rigor and fullness, there are more than fifty Muslim countries in the world,” I cannot help but hear: “only Jews who accept this iron law, this identitarian Catholicism, may remain among us. The rest can pack for Israel.”

If we take Zemmour seriously, what he is calling for is not revival, but purification, regeneration through erasure. In his France, only those who submit to the triumphant Identitarian Church are meant to survive. To everyone else—universalist Jews, secularists, Muslims, Protestants, left-wing Catholics, nonconforming minorities—he offers no dialogue, no recognition, only war. Reconquista.

---

Gabriel Abensour