Salman Rushdie, who had slung some unpublishable insults at the protesters on Twitter, said the affair had been “damaging and divisive” but instructive.

“In the last 10 days, the Anglophone world has been given enough information to understand that Charlie Hebdo is the exact opposite of the racist publication it has been said to be,” he said.

The cartoonist Alison Bechdel, one of the replacement hosts, said the debate had shades of gray, but that the Texas attack on Sunday at an event organized by the American Freedom Defense Initiative, an anti-Islam group, had been clarifying.

“That group attacks Muslims in a way that Charlie Hebdo really doesn’t,” she said.

In a meeting with The New York Times’s editorial board on Thursday, Mr. Biard said that Charlie Hebdo attacked belief systems, including all religions, not groups. He cited the results of a study in the newspaper Le Monde indicating that only seven of roughly 500 Charlie Hebdo covers published from 2005 to 2015 primarily mocked Islam. “We’re not obsessed with Islam,” he said. “We’re dealing with politics, with other religions.”

The gala highlighted the magazine’s anti-racist history. The French-Congolese novelist Alain Mabanckou paid tribute to the magazine’s belief that “there were no taboos when it came to exercising free speech.” Dominique Sopo, the president of the French anti-bias group SOS Racisme, flew in from Paris for an unannounced visit.

“It is very important we do not kill those who died a second time by raising a polemic like this,” he said, referring to charges that the magazine was racist. “Remember that Charlie Hebdo stands for anti-hatred.”

The evening concluded with PEN’s Freedom to Write Award, given to the Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismayilova, who has been imprisoned since early December after writing about corruption allegations against the family of Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev. (Of the 38 honorees who were in jail at the time they received the award, 34 were later freed, according to PEN.)

But before announcing that award, the group’s executive director, Suzanne Nossel, addressed the writers who had withdrawn from the gala, and took a page from Charlie Hebdo. “Tout est pardonné,” she said, referring to the sign held by the Prophet Muhammad on the magazine’s first cover after the attacks. “Let’s move on together in defense of freedom of expression.”