From Desmond Dekker's ‘The Israelites’ to Bob Marley's Exodus, the Caribbean story of exile and struggle for freedom has frequently compared itself to the Old Testament account of the Jewish people. In the early twentieth century, Jamaican Marcus Garvey's Black Zionism movement used Jewish Zionism as a template for the Caribbean aspiration to return to Africa; and some Rastafarians consider themselves to be ‘the Twelfth Tribe of Judah’. In ‘Deux figures du destin’, his introduction to ‘Mémoire juive, mémoire nègre: deux figures du destin’, Roger Toumson points out that this parallelism extends to the whole of the Americas: ‘Le récit exilique de l'Ancien Testament est devenu, depuis les premières chroniques de la traite, une référence obligée du destin nègre aux Amériques’ (p. 11). On the narrower issue of France's attitude towards its Caribbean colonies, Toumson shows how Jews and black people, these two exemplary manifestations of the Other, have long been closely interconnected: the ‘Code noir’ of 1615 is mainly concerned with regulating the treatment of African slaves in the French Caribbean, but its first article ‘[enjoint] à tous nos officiers de chasser hors de nos Isles tous les juifs qui y ont établi leurs résidences’ (p. 11); conversely, the Abbé Grégoire became famous in the eighteenth century as much for his castigation of anti-Semitism as for his defence of Negro slaves, and, as Toumson describes it, for ‘raisonnant par analogie, posant et résolvant dans les mêmes termes le problème de la condition civile des Juifs et celui de la condition servile des Nègres’ (p. 12).

In the aftermath of the Second World War, however, these parallels assume a rather different form. In the 1950s and 1960s, Europe was both coming to terms with the Jewish holocaust and witnessing the beginnings of large-scale immigration from the Caribbean. Now, in other words, the focus is less on Jewish exile in Egypt and more on Jewish incarceration in concentration camps; and the Caribbean experience of diaspora is less that of the original exile from Africa than the new migrations from the Caribbean to Europe. In France, the racism encountered by Caribbean immigrants has obvious similarities with – as well as important differences from – the older anti-Semitism.