That is, the passions motivating this new anti-Zionism were implausibly large. They were explicable only if one assumed they had a deeper root. The publication of social scientist and essayist Pierre-André Taguieff's path-breaking book, La Nouvelle Judéophobie in 2002, helped French readers to understand that anti-Zionism was sometimes only a way of expressing anti-Semitism in an age of taboos. The report of former diplomat Jean-Christophe Rufin in 2004 identified a form of "radical anti-Zionism" as to blame in the climate of hostility felt by French Jews. 

This spring, the philosopher Alain Badiou and the historian Eric Hazan published an odd pamphlet attacking those worrying about a rise, or a recurrence, of anti-Semitism. Their book is in the Leftist tradition of the 1980s and 1990s that seeks to water down Holocaust memory by universalising it. It refers to the persecuted Jews of the 1930s as "the Arabs and Africans of that era". But the authors' unwillingness to see a rise in anti-Semitism is hemmed in by so many qualifications and notwithstandings that it is hard to see why they bother to express it. They admit, for instance, that Dieudonné's rants constitute anti-Semitism of a classic kind. They allow that the Holocaust-deniers who have duped Noam Chomsky and others into defending them have similar motivations.

What Badiou and Hazan want to do is destroy the idea that certain criticisms of the state of Israel are unreasonable on their face. To claim that anti-Semitism is on the rise, they believe, is a mere opération de stigmatisation, meant to distract the reader from Israeli brutality. Thus, the attacks carried out by suburban youth in Paris on individual Jews did not constitute anti-Semitism, but just a "poorly politicised political hostility". If one understands Badiou and Hazan correctly, this is a way of saying that the attacks were legitimate but that the youths didn't find the right words to explain them. What they meant to attack was Israel or perhaps French urban policy. But this is, of course, nonsense. Those Jews attacked in the suburbs since 2002 were attacked because they were Jews — they were not interrogated beforehand as to their political opinions. 

Robert Zaretsky, a professor of French history at the University of Houston, has said that French Jewish thinkers, "through their quibbling about Islam and Israel", are destroying the intellectual tradition that they helped to build. Zaretsky's verdict is harsh — the matters at hand are hardly quibbles — but it is true that the explosion of discussion over anti-Semitism has divided Jews. 

On one hand, French Jews tend to be, like the majority of Jews in the West, on the political Left, loyal to the Socialist Party. An optimistic way of looking at the arguments over Islam and Israel is to say, as one left-leaning Jewish journalist told me over lunch in Paris this summer, that whereas the context of Jewish life in France used to be the Second Intifada, the new context is the Arab Spring. While this sounds more like a talking point than an observation, the optimistic spirit has given rise to a new initiative. 

JCall is built around media celebrities, mostly intellectuals. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Alain Finkielkraut, David Grossman, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Pierre Nora and Henry Rousso are among them. (Its manifesto begins: "Nous, personnalites" and its founding statement is called, obnoxiously, "An Appeal to Reason" — as if those who disagree lack it.) Like the American lobby J Street, on which it is based, JCall is meant to break the power of organised Jewish groups and create pressure on Israel to come to the negotiating table for a two-state solution. But there is a logical problem with this aspiration. France does not have powerful organised Jewish groups. It does not even have politicised ones. Some radical republicans object to President Nicolas Sarkozy's appearances before the CRIF, an umbrella group of leaders of Jewish organisations, but there is no French equivalent of, say, the America-Israel Political Action Committee (Aipac).