French far-right party presidential candidate Eric Zemmour’s advisor Sarah Knafo looks on during a campaign visit in Port-en-Bessin, north-western France, Feb. 19, 2022. (Jean-Francois Monier\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
A studious, charming and well connected law graduate of the prestigious Sciences Po university who works as a public funds auditor, Knafo was deemed highly likely to succeed by the classmates of her Jewish high school in Pavillons-sous-Bois, a northeastern suburb of Paris.<\/p>\n
But few people, if any, expected Knafo to rise the way she did: by becoming the protege, lover and campaign manager of \u00c9ric Zemmour, a Jewish right-wing presidential candidate and 63-year-old married father of three.<\/p>\n
The French gossip papers and their paparazzi have pounced on the relationship, speculating about what appeared to be Knafo\u2019s pregnancy earlier this year and taking pictures of the pair during their beach vacation at Christmas. The tabloid coverage has increased the campaign\u2019s visibility, though it\u2019s unclear how it is affecting right-wing voters, who may see the affair as conflicting with their traditional values \u2014 or as evidence that Zemmour is a virile, paternal figure, exactly what they believe incumbent President Emmanuel Macron is not.<\/p>\n
Whichever way it plays out at the polls, the Zemmour-Knafo love story is a striking partnership between two successful Parisian Jews who have shunned the conventions of their own communities and bet their careers and reputations on harnessing a discontented conservative electorate.<\/p>\n
Both come from Jewish families with roots in North Africa and have embraced a right-wing, anti-immigrant politics that is more common among France\u2019s Christian conservatives. Both have said Jews who choose to live in France should feel an allegiance first to France, not to their Judaism.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can identify with \u00c9ric Zemmour\u2019s trajectory for assimilation and his detachment from the Jewish identity,\u201d Knafo said during a rare interview in 2016. \u201cMy religion is Jewish, but I feel my culture is Christian.\u201d<\/p>\n
The pair\u2019s political prospects are uncertain. Zemmour has failed to crack the top echelon of the French polls for this month\u2019s elections, suggesting that Marine Le Pen, not he, will go on as the right\u2019s candidate in the second and final round April 24. That could set France up for a repeat of 2017, when Le Pen, the daughter of the Holocaust-denying Jean-Marie Le Pen of the far-right National Rally party, obtained a third of the vote but ultimately lost to Macron, a centrist.<\/p>\n
Marine Le Pen and Zemmour agree on many key issues: They are both fierce critics of the European Union and support drastically limiting immigration from Africa and the Middle East, positions for which they have been labeled pro-fascist by their critics. Both have been tried for alleged hate speech against Muslims; while Le Pen was acquitted, Zemmour was convicted for saying most drug dealers are Africans or Arabs.<\/p>\n
Zemmour\u2019s supporters think he would be a stronger candidate than Le Pen, in part because his pedigree as the son of Jewish parents from Algeria insulates him from the fascism charges that have dogged Le Pen because of her father. A veteran television pundit, Zemmour is also widely seen as a quicker orator than the sometimes sluggish Le Pen.<\/p>\n
But since rumors of Knafo\u2019s pregnancy broke in November, coverage of her love affair with Zemmour has in some ways eclipsed talk of his politics.<\/p>\n
Zemmour, who has three children with his wife, Myl\u00e8ne Chichportich, a Jew of Tunisian descent, finally acknowledged their romantic involvement in a January interview with BFMTV. Asked \u201cWho is Sarah Knafo,\u201d he told the interviewer: \u201cMy partner. My life partner. There would\u2019ve been no campaign if not for Sarah Knafo.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was an unusual statement on every level. Zemmour had sued to prevent tabloids from publishing pictures of him with Knafo just months earlier. He was also breaking from tradition in French politics by praising Knafo publicly, according to Philippe Karsenty, a French Jew and former politician who knows Zemmour personally.<\/p>\n
\u201cUsually, campaign leaders stay in the background. To this day, I don\u2019t know the name of Macron\u2019s campaign manager,\u201d Karsenty said. \u201c\u00c9ric has placed her at the center of his campaign.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even before the tabloid coverage kicked into high gear, it was evident that their relationship goes far beyond that of a campaign manager and their boss.<\/p>\n
At political rallies, observant reporters noticed how Knafo coached Zemmour during debates, correcting him from an off-camera perch on figures using hand gestures, telling him to slow down when she thought he spoke too fast and cueing him through a series of facial expressions that demonstrated deep familiarity.<\/p>\n
Knafo \u201corganizes everything, thinks of everything and structures everything,\u201d Emilie Lanez, a reporter for Paris Match, said in September during an interview for BFMTV about paparazzi photos that showed Zemmour hugging Knafo on the beach near Toulon. (Paris Match\u2019s Herv\u00e9 Gattegno was fired for printing those photos on the cover, in what was seen as a violation of the unwritten rule in France against invasive media coverage of politicians\u2019 private lives.)<\/p>\n
But Lanez said the intimate nature of their relationship is less interesting to her than \u201cthe astonishing scope of Sarah Knafo\u2019s network. This highly-intelligent, sociable young woman maintains ties with former nobility, former key personalities [of the administration of Socialist former President Francois] Mitterrand, young, left-wing supporters of President Emmanuel Macron almost as though she\u2019s not the head of the campaign for Zemmour.\u201d<\/p>\n
To build and maintain such a network, Lanez added, Knafo would have had to \u201cassimilate\u201d for many years in left-leaning circles where she would have been ostracized for espousing the sort of views championed by Zemmour, who often inveighs against what he calls the cultural elites whom he says are betraying the French people by plotting to replace them with Muslim immigrants.<\/p>\n
Knafo, who rarely speaks to the media and declined to be interviewed for this article, has known Zemmour since she was a teenager at least, according to Anael Chemla, one of her former classmates at the Alliance Jewish high school in Pavillons-sous-Bois.<\/p>\n
The circumstances of how they met are vague. According to some versions, including one offered by Knafo last year in a rare interview with the L\u2019Obs magazine, Knafo\u2019s parents \u2014 a hypnotherapist mother and businessman father, both of Moroccan descent \u2014 were acquainted with Zemmour. Other accounts have her contacting him as a teenager in the mid 2000s as a fan of his television show.<\/p>\n
Knafo\u2019s ties to Zemmour were well known to people around her already when she was a teenager, Chemla, Knafo\u2019s former classmate, recalled.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was then just a celebrity journalist, not a political person. But she was private about it, she never bragged about knowing Zemmour. She was also very well-informed about politics but did not say radical things,\u201d Chemla, 27, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.<\/p>\n
Chemla said it \u201csaddened\u201d her to see her former classmate\u2019s name in gossip magazines reporting about her pregnancy with a married man more than twice her age.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope Sarah is happy. It just doesn\u2019t look like the sort of thing that makes you happy,\u201d said Chemla, who now lives in Israel and says she does not support Zemmour\u2019s presidential bid.<\/p>\n
Knafo\u2019s life has been fraught with unhappy moments. Her mother suffered a violent assault on the street when she was pregnant with Knafo\u2019s younger brother, according to a French media profile of Knafo. The brother, Dan, was born with a severe disability and died in 2018 at age 21.<\/p>\n
The assault, which was part of a robbery, profoundly shook the sense of security of Sarah Knafo and her sister, Cindy, who works as a fashion photographer. Sarah Knafo earlier this month revisited that aspect of her childhood in a rare intervention on her part during an interview that Elle had with Zemmour.<\/p>\n
When the subject of the safety of women in France came up, she told Elle: \u201cIn Seine-Saint-Denis [the district to which Pavillons-sous-Bois belongs] where I grew up, it was palpable,\u201d she said of the feeling of insecurity for women. \u201cMy parents forbade me to take the bus.\u201d<\/p>\n
Many of the students at the Alliance Pavillons-sous-Bois Jewish high school that Knafo attended live outside that relatively poor suburb, where the rate of assaults on individuals is more than double that of Neuilly-sur-Seine, a more affluent suburb where many Jews live.<\/p>\n
The French Jewish community\u2019s main watchdog group last month said that it had recorded an increase of 75% in antisemitic incidents last year over 2020. The increase to 589 incidents owed in part to a rise in physical assaults.<\/p>\n
The security situation could play a role in the upcoming election, especially after the revelation this week that a Jewish man\u2019s death in February that was originally attributed to a vehicle accident actually followed an assault. Zemmour questioned whether the victim, J\u00e9r\u00e9mie Cohen, had been attacked or details of his death suppressed because he was Jewish.<\/p>\n
One Jewish mother whose children attend Alliance Pavillons-Sous-Bois, Sandra Sebbah, told JTA in 2015 that she encourages them to leave France so they can live \u201clike normal people and not like this, where I am afraid every minute they\u2019re not home \u2014 especially when they\u2019re at school.\u201d<\/p>\n
This dynamic was a factor in the departure of many of the 50,000-odd French Jews who had left France for Israel over the past decade \u2013 a significant drain on French Jewry. France is Europe\u2019s largest Jewish community with about 446,000 people who self-identify as Jews, according to a 2020 demographic study.<\/p>\n
But Knafo was never one of the many Alliance students who spoke about leaving, said Chemla, Knafo\u2019s former classmate who immigrated to Israel last year.<\/p>\n
In a little-publicized op-ed that Knafo penned as a student in 2016 on Dafina.net, a French-language website on Moroccan Jewry, she criticized French Jews on multiple counts, including the instinctive support for Israel many of them feel.<\/p>\n
Jews who leave for Israel, she wrote, aren\u2019t really doing it to escape antisemitism or for financial reasons but because they are not fully part of French society. \u201cThe reasons for their leaving are rooted in identity,\u201d she wrote, and therefore reflect \u201cthe perverse effects of multiculturalism.\u201d<\/p>\n
A former straight-A student already embarked on a promising legal career, Knafo in 2017 gave her school a quote for a promotional flier in which she was featured alongside far older graduates who were far more famous, including the philosopher Armand Ab\u00e9cassis, 88, and the late author Albert Memmi.<\/p>\n
Far from focusing on Alliance\u2019s capacity for strengthening Jewish identity, Knafo extolled the school\u2019s potential for opening Jews to broader society.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s one of the rare places where children need not renounce anything and reaffirm both facets of the identities, Jewish and French, without having one come at the expense of the other,\u201d she wrote. It was long before anyone entertained the notion of a presidential bid by Zemmour, who often uses similar language in describing his ideal for the relationship between the majority and minorities in France.<\/p>\n
Judaism is one of the things that connect her to Zemmour, she added in the 2016 interview, in which she said she feels an affinity with Christian culture. She was speaking to the author Alexandre Devecchio for his book \u201cThe New Children of the Century,\u201d about young French conservatives.<\/p>\n
Knafo used the term \u201cFrench Israelite,\u201d an antiquated and unusual formulation that Zemmour also uses. He has explained that it is more fitting than \u201cJew\u201d because it does not carry a religious implication while still signifying the subject\u2019s ethnic and cultural particularities.<\/p>\n
The identity is a curiosity for Chemla, who recalls Knafo\u2019s success in their Jewish high school.<\/p>\n
\u201cSarah, who was studious, sociable and pleasant, could rise to the top of French politics, or law, or whatever she chose,\u201d she said classmates believed. \u201cAnd I guess she did, but not in the way any of us thought.\u201d<\/p>\n
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