Paris, once considered balm for the artistic, café-hopping soul, is now bad for your health — particularly for those individuals who identify as Jewish. Such is the inevitable conclusion of a report published Thursday by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France, better known by its French acronym, le Crif.

In its report the council describes with dispiriting specificity an explosion in the number of antisemitic acts committed in France in 2023. Since the Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7, the number of such acts increased tenfold in France — no small disgrace for a country that is still home to the world’s third largest Jewish community and that crows about its revolutionary ideals of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. 

While 436 anti-Semitic acts were recorded in France in 2022, the number of incidents jumped to 1,676 last year. The estimated one thousand percent spike in incidents coincides not merely with the October 7 terrorist attacks but more precisely, according to the council, with the robust Israeli “riposte” to those attacks. “During the three months following the October 7 attack, the number of antisemitic acts equaled that of the previous three years combined,” the report states. 

After October 7, a quarter of the  antisemitic incidents recorded were classified as an “apology for Hamas,” a third were classified as “jihadist” in nature, and another quarter were direct “calls for the murder” of Jews. 

Violent acts targeting Jews occurred in the beloved French capital but not only: across 94 percent of France, touching virtually every corner of the land,  there were incidents reported.

Nearly 13 percent of the antisemitic acts were committed in schools, the majority of which were middle schools. That, for the council, is especially worrisome: “There is a real uptick in the youthful perpetrators of antisemitic acts. School therefore no longer represents a sanctuary,” the report states.

What exactly does an antisemitic incident in France “look” like? The French press is rife with accounts, some of which indicate that French Jews are being singled out as the targets for hate crimes because their names sound Jewish. 

The French newspaper Le Parisien reported this week on an antisemitic incident in the Isère region, southeast of Paris, in which a French Jewish couple’s apartment was ransacked after the perpetrator identified what appeared to be  a Jewish-sounding last name on a mailbox. The perpetrator subsequently broke into the apartment, painted “Death to the Jews” in black capital letters on the white wall of the living room and also painted a swastika above an overturned television stand. In effect, the couple was lucky: up to 60 percent of reported acts of antisemitism include physical violence.

In respect of such crimes there is a dark echo of the case of Ilan Halimi, a young French Jew who in 2006 was kidnapped, tortured, and subsequently murdered in a suburb of Paris. The ringleaders of that crime had singled out Mr. Halimi for their attack because, they eventually told French authorities, they believed that “Jews have the money.”

This correspondent, covering the Halimi story for a French press agency at the time, remembers well that mainstream French press, notably the left-leaning Le Monde, lagged behind when it came to unequivocally labeling the crimes against Mr. Halimi as antisemitic in nature. In any case, the council’s new report noted there was a 200 percent spike in antisemitic acts following the attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012 and a 300 percent jump after the attack on a kosher supermarket  in 2015.

Press coverage of the massacres perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, instead of acting as a barrier to violence committed against Jews, appears to have had the opposite effect. “On October 7, even as images of the massacre of Israeli civilians were broadcast, antisemitic acts increased by more than 700 percent compared to the daily average observed from year to year,” the report stated.