A Town Divided.(Jews and Muslims in Bondy, France)(Brief Article)

Annie Levy, 36, likes to say that her hometown of Bondy on the eastern outskirts of Paris "is a little picture of France." But the picture isn't a very pretty one these days. Last year the synagogue was burned. Last month young men in a local Jewish soccer club were set upon by a masked gang using baseball bats, iron rods and even petanque balls as weapons. Some of the attackers, whose identities still have not been discovered by police, wore the black-checked scarves of Palestine and shouted, "Allahu akbar" (God is great). Then came last week's success for the ultrarightist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has called the Holocaust "a detail of history" and punned on the name of a Jewish politician whose name included the French word for "oven."

The understandable reaction in places like Bondy is fear. "People are scared," says Levy, who works as a secretary for the municipal sports association. And while tremors have swept through all the "foreign" communities, many of the 400 Jewish families among Bondy's 47,000 residents see themselves potentially besieged. Like other Jews in France, especially those in immigrant neighborhoods, they are feeling the brunt of what some call "the new anti-Semitism." It's a melange of hatred from different sources that also despise each other: the old Catholic, crypto-fascist right with which Le Pen traditionally is identified, and the unemployed, almost aimlessly violent young men who target their Jewish neighbors to avenge the perceived sins of Israel, or to emulate the supposed glory of Osama bin Laden.

Annie Levy's husband, Lionel, a team-handball coach, is thinking of taking her and their two young daughters to Israel. His parents are there. But Annie doesn't want to go. One of the things that makes her proud of her town is the mix of people. France may not see itself as a nation of immigrants, but on the streets of Bondy it sure feels like one. Both the Jews and the more numerous Arabs came mostly in the 1950s and 1960s from Algeria. The leaders of the two communities hail from the same little village.

Altogether, some 50 nationalities are represented in this one town, says Sidi-Hamed Selles, who runs cultural programs for city hall. "A lot has been done [by local government] so that people will listen to each other." he says. And many still do. Lionel Levy's best buddy is Dramane Doumbia, a Muslim originally from Mali. One of Annie's good friends is Fonta Diagne, a nurse's assistant and a Muslim who was born in Senegal. "It's only when I came to France that I had a sense how compartmentalized a society could be," says Diagne over a drink at the Levys'. "In Senegal we always welcome strangers." Doumbia sees the violence being imported from abroad. "The media are paving the way for this," he says. None of these friends believes in the clash of civilizations. None of them wants to surrender to fear and hate. "If everybody leaves," says Annie Levy, "it's like saying Le Pen is right."

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