TAGUIEFF, Pierre-André 1946(?)-

PERSONAL: Born 1946 (some sources say 1948).

ADDRESSES: Offıce—Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 2, rue Michel-Ange, 75794 Paris, France.

CAREER: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France, research director.

WRITINGS:

La force du préjugé: essai sur le racisme et ses doubles, Découverte (Paris, France), 1988, translation by Hassan Melehy published as The Force of Prejudice: On Racism and Its Doubles, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2001.

Face au racisme, Découverte (Paris, France), 1991.

(With Gil Delannoi) Théories du nationalisme, Editions Kim (Paris, France), 1991.

Les protocoles des sages de sion, Berg International (Paris, France), 1992.

Sur la nouvelle droit: jalons d'une analyse critique, Descartes (Paris, France), 1994.

Les fins de l'antiracisme: essai, Michalon (Paris, France), 1995.

La république menacée: entretiens ave Philippe petit, Editions Textuel (Paris, France), 1996.

Le racisme: Un exposé pour comprendre, un essai pour réfléchir, Flammarion (Paris, France), 1997.

(With Michéle Tribalat) Face au front national: arguments pour une contre-offensive, Découverte (Paris, France), 1998.

La coleur et la sang: doctrines racistes . . . la française, (title means "The Color and the Blood"), Mille et une Nuits (Paris, France), 1998.

(With Grégoire Kauffmann, Michael Lenoire, Robert Belot, and others) Léantisémitisme de plume, 1940-1944: études et documents, Berg (Paris, France), 1999.

L'effacement de l'avenir, Galilée (Paris, France), 2000.

Du progress: biographie d'une utopie moderne, EJL (Paris, France), 2001.

Résister au "bougisme": démocratie forte contre mondialisation techno-marchande, Mille et une Nuits (Paris, France), 2001.

(With Gil Delannoi) Nationalismes en perspective, Berg (Paris, France), 2001.

L'illusion populiste: de l'archaque au médiatique, Berg (Paris, France), 2002.

La nouvelle judéophobie, Mille et une nuits (Paris, France), 2002, translation by Patrick Camiller published as Rising from the Muck: The New Anti-Semitism in Europe, Ivan R. Dee (Chicago, IL), 2004.

Le sens du progress: une approche historique et philosophique, Flammarion (Paris, France), 2004.

Le retour du populisme: Un dé fi pour les démocraties europeénes, Universalis (Paris, France), 2004.

Precheurs de haine: traversée de la judéophobie planétaire, Mille et une Nuits (Paris, France), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: Pierre-André Taguieff serves as both head of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and as one of the foremost commentators on the problem of racism in modern Europe. His works, ranging from The Force of Prejudice: On Racism and ItsDoubles and Face au racisme to La nouvelle judéophobie,—translated as Rising from the Muck: The New Anti-Semitism in Europe—concentrate on one of Europe's longest-standing and historic examples of racism: the anti-Semitism that culminated during the twentieth century in the Holocaust. Taguieff's work is held to be especially significant in France, where anti-Semitism ran rife in the late nineteenth century, culminating in the racist conviction of Captain Albert Dreyfus for espionage. The recent rise of ultranationalists like Jean-Marie le Pen continues to encourage discrimination and violence against French Jews. Late in 2003 French President Jacques Chirac, according to John Vinocur in the Tocqueville Connection, "conceded that his country has a troubled place among the European nations where anti-Jewish outbursts and attacks have become an undeniable and embarrassing problem."

Taguieff's Rising from the Muck, published in French in 2002, explains the difference he perceives between the twentieth-century Nazi pseudoscientific Judeophobia and the more recent incarnation of anti-Semitism. The new French anti-Semitism, explained Vinocur, has "nothing to do with the racialist vulgate of the Nazis. Rather [Tanguieff writes,]. . . it was transported by Islamic radicalism and relayed by European political groups looking to replace worn-out battle cries of third world revolution and anti-imperialism." As Vinocur concluded of Tanguieff's argument, "Since the 1990s . . . factions of various groups . . . have contributed to making judeophobic clichés and slogans acceptable, and then respectable, on the basis of a nazification of the 'Jews Zionists Israelis.'"

In part, critics saw Rising from the Muck as recognizing that the modern anti-Semitism that had its origins in Europe had been internationalized beyond the countries of its origins to become a truly international phenomenon. Taguieff cites an episode in the historic visit by Pope John Paul II to Damascus, in which Syrian President Assad invokes common cause with Catholics in opposition to international Jewry. "Perhaps it had escaped Assad's notice," remarked Wilson Quarterly contributor Samuel G. Freedman, "that the Roman Catholic Church disavowed the charge of deicide against Jews nearly 40 years earlier, amid the Second Vatican Council's reforms." That "moment," Freedman concluded, "concisely and vividly represents a passing of the torch of Jew hatred from its traditional home in Christian Europe to its contemporary base in the Muslim world."

Third-world countries with strong, politically active Muslim populations, Taguieff suggests, associate Judaism with Zionism—the vindication of a Jewish political state with its capital at Jerusalem—and imperialism—the domination, economic or political, of one country by another. "Sentiments of this kind help to define the transnational reality of political Islam and are the ideological underpinnings of violent actions on a global scale," declared Frederic Krome in Library Journal. "Taguieff's detailed exposure of the political culture that has given rise to Judeophobia is therefore indispensable."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Global Information Network, January 22, 2002, Julio Godoy, "Politics-France: Gov't Urged to Stem Anti-Semitic Attacks," p. 1.

Library Bookwatch, October, 2004, review of Rising from the Muck: The New Anti-Semitism in Europe.

Library Journal, May 1, 2004, Frederic Krome, review of Rising from the Muck, p. 129.

New Leader, May-June, 2004, Alvin H. Rosenfeld, "Exposing the Rise of Judeophobia," p. 23.

Washington Post, May 2, 2004, Jonathan Groner, "The State of Anti-Semitism," p. T10.

Wilson Quarterly, summer, 2004, Samuel G. Freedom, "Old Toxin, New Vessels," p. 114.

ONLINE

Journal du CNRS Online,http://www2.cnrs.fr/presse/journal/ (December 6, 2004).

Tocqueville Connection Online,http://www.adetocqueville.com/ (December 6, 2004), John Vinocur, "Chirac's Condemnation of French Anti-Semitism Is Less than Full."*