What’s Behind the Resurgence in French Anti-Semitism

“Today I no longer have full confidence that anti-Semitic hate crimes in France are handled properly.” Thus, in a recent interview, lamented Sammy Ghozlan, a former French policeman who now runs France’s National Bureau for Vigilance against Anti-Semitism.

Government officials, Ghozlan said, hesitate to apply the anti-Semitism label even when there is clear justification for it. One such occasion, by now notorious, was the 2017 murder of Sarah Halimi, a sixty-six-year-old Jewish woman beaten in her home by a Muslim man with a history of drug use, casual anti-Jewish insults, and a troubled psyche who was heard yelling “Satan” before throwing Halimi from her balcony onto the pavement several stories below. In covering the murder, the French national press took weeks to mention anti-Semitism. At the trial of the accused in court, Halimi’s Jewish identity was instead determined to have “clashed with [the killer’s] delirious state of mind”—so testified expert psychologists—and therefore could not itself have been the rationale for her murder.

There are many similar cases, Ghozlan observes, in which the perpetrators’ anti-Semitic “delusions” have led courts to decline to sentence the accused. Take the case of Mohammed Merah, the Islamist who in 2012, two years before the brutal murder of Sarah Halimi, killed seven people in Toulouse including a rabbi and three Jewish schoolchildren. Merah had suffered physical abuse as a child and was routinely exposed to Islamist anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. His disturbed upbringing resulted in a young adult with a host of mental-health problems—enough, evidently, to persuade French officials to categorize him as a “lone wolf” whose situation was too particular to be linked to anti-Semitism, let alone to broader societal trends like Islamism.