Whether or not Jews, and defenders of Israel more generally, are getting more conservative, it is in Nicolas Sarkozy's UMP party that their most vocal defenders and allies are increasingly found. At Barouch's demonstration, Claude Goasguen, a pro-American Parisian in the National Assembly , spoke. So did his colleague Eric Raoult, who condemned the anti-Israel boats as a "terrorist flotilla". Other pro-Israel UMP members include Patrick Devedjian, a leader of the intellectual wing of the party's Right for decades. Foreign minister Alain Juppé heartened French Jews in July when he warned — in anticipation of a possible unilateral declaration of statehood by the Palestinians at the United Nations this autumn — that any solution to the Middle East crisis must include a "nation-state of Israel for the Jewish people".

Trigano gives Sarkozy credit for having turned the tide against anti-Semitic street violence as minister of the interior. But if Sarkozy has reassured the community and, as president, won their loyalty, it is due just as much to his foreign policy. The long dominance of Sarkozy's predecessor Jacques Chirac was marked by a politique arabe, which is to say a foreign policy in harmony with the wishes of the Arab world, or at least of its dictators, and often at odds with those of Israel. Chirac tried to shore up the Jewish vote at home by compensating with high-profile symbolic acts, some would say stunts, such as apologising in 1995 for the role of the French state in the 1942 roundups. Sarkozy, by contrast, has pursued a foreign policy that is in line with the values of the United States and Israel, which he considers to be the values of France. 

A curious development in French politics in the past year has been the relaunching of France's National Front (FN) under Marine Le Pen. Although democratic, the party has long been a bulwark of the hardline Right, with unmistakable overtones of Poujadism, a French fascist movement of the 1950s. Ms Le Pen's father and predecessor, Jean-Marie LePen, was long notorious for slipping anti-Semitic provocations into his speeches. Like the late Jörg Haider in Austria, he had kind words for those Arab dictators — such as Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Saddam Hussein in Iraq — who set themselves against Israel. 

Ms Le Pen aims to turn the party into a more modern kind of anti-globalist, anti-multiculturalist force. In so doing, she has sought ostentatiously to purge it of its anti-Semites, categorically condemning such prejudices and even expelling a member earlier this year for making a Nazi salute. Barrouch admits that the FN has been trying to win members of his organisation over. He estimates that a quarter of his members might be inclined to vote for Ms Le Pen, if only because they assume she will take care of problems linked to immigration. He himself distrusts her, saying she has maintained "exactly the same friends" that her father had. 

It is important to remember that a quarter of the Jewish vote, while it sounds large, is identical to the percentage Ms Le Pen is polling in the general population. But Sarkozy's UMP is conscious of a new rival. Last winter, Ms Le Pen was invited on the Jewish radio station Radio J, which cancelled at the last minute, most likely under pressure not from their listeners but from Sarkozy's aides.

Battles over Israel, and over inner-city ethnic relations, are bound to intensify in the run-up to France's presidential elections next spring. Pierre-André Taguieff has suggested, with some justification, that Europe's old "Jewish question" has reemerged in a new form. When Karl Marx and other intellectuals addressed this question in the 1840s, a form of political organisation new to most countries — the nation-state — presented new problems for deciding what kind of rights governments owed to ethnic minorities and what kind of loyalty ethnic minorities owed the state. The question of how a nation could fit within a nation had no easy resolution. The "emancipation" offered to Jews was ambiguous and often involuntary. Their predicament was ultimately resolved only with the creation of the state of Israel.