The French Riots and the Jews

The recent chaos is not an antisemitic intifada—it’s something worse

2014 marked both the peak of random antisemitic incidents across the country and the prelude to the deadly terror wave that began on Jan. 7-9, 2015, with the killings at Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher kosher supermarket in Paris. Throughout the spring of 2015, the French authorities counted nearly one attempted violent attack per week, culminating in the Bataclan massacre on Nov. 13. The tension began to fall only after the mass killing the following year in Nice, where a heavy truck attacked the crowd watching the fireworks display on Bastille Day, July 14, killing 86 people and injuring hundreds more. 

Most of these attacks contained at least one antisemitic element—Charlie Hebdowas perceived as Zionist-controlled, the Hypercacher of course was Jewish, and the Bataclan had been on the target list of Islamist groups for years for being owned by two Jewish brothers, a fact that authorities and the media denied, but that French Jews understood only too well, especially after the decade they had been through. As a result, the number of aliyahs from France, on a constant rise since the attack on the Ozar Ha Torah school in Toulouse in 2012, reached 8,000 in 2016—an astonishing number.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/french-riots-and-the-jews