Other than the Name?

Other than the Name? 2015-03-13T22:41:27-05:00

Source, with the final comment being incomprehensible:

There is only one road, a few houses and a farm. But the French hamlet La Mort aux Juifs, about 70 miles south of Paris, has attracted international attention. Translated, the hamlet’s name reads, “Death to Jews.” For centuries, nobody really seemed to care about it. This changed Monday, however, when the Jewish Simon Wiesenthal Center sent a letter to France’s interior minister.

The fact that “it was unnoticed during seventy years since the liberation of France from the Nazis […] is most shocking,” the letter signed by the center’s director for international relations, Shimon Samuels, reads. According to the Wiesenthal Center, the name could date to the 11th century, when pogroms led to the expulsion of 110,000 Jews from France in 1306.

Marie-Elizabeth Secretand, the deputy mayor of Courtemaux, which has jurisdiction over the hamlet, does not understand why the name “Death to Jews” has caused a sudden uproar. “It’s ridiculous. This name has always existed,” she told the news agency Agence France-Presse. “Why change a name that goes back to the Middle Ages or even further? We should respect these old names. […] No one has anything against the Jews, of course.”

No one but the name and everyone who has to say it or think it has to trod on that history all over again.


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