France has seen a surge in antisemitism since the outbreak of the Gaza war in October, a new survey by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reveals.
France registered the highest increase in recorded antisemitic incidents of any country with reliable statistics in 2023, with a near-quadrupling of incidents from 436 in 2022 to 1,676 last year. The majority of these incidents (74%) occurred after October 7, when Hamas terrorists killed approximately 1,200 innocent civilians in Israel and abducted 253 others.
Some of the antisemitic events exemplified in the ADL study were a December incident in which an assailant broke into a Paris daycare and threatened its Jewish director with a knife, and the November attempted murder of a Jewish woman in her home in Lyon. Another incident involved a threat to blow up 20 Jewish schools in Paris that was uncovered by police in late October.
Shockingly, on a per-capita basis, French Jews, who number around 440,000, were three times more likely to experience an antisemitic attack compared to Jews in the United States, whose population is estimated at 6 million.
