In the latest poll that Ipsos has taken for the Jewish group CRIF, 68% of French people responded that antisemitism in France is “widespread.” More on this deeply disturbing response can be found here: “France poll: 68% believe antisemitism is widespread in country,” by Michael Starr, Jerusalem Post, November 13, 2025:
Antisemitism is widespread in France, and French Jews are justified in feeling unsafe in the republic, a majority of French people believe, according to a Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) and Ipsos poll published on Tuesday.
The poll of 1,000 people representative of the French population conducted between last Monday and Tuesday found that 68% of respondents believed antisemitism to be a widespread phenomenon.
However, this belief had decreased from previous polls, dropping from 75% in 2020 and 79% in 2024.
So this is the glass half full: yes, more than two-thirds — 68% — of French people believe antisemitism is widespread, but at least that figure has decreased from the 79% who believed it was widespread in 2024, when the Gaza war was at its height, and so was anti-Israel hysteria everywhere.
Sixty-six percent of participants said that antisemitism had increased over the years, 27% of whom thought it was significantly more widespread. This was higher than the 62% of respondents in a 2020 poll but lower than 70% in 2024….
Is this glass half full, or half empty? I’d call it the latter, given that two-thirds of those polled said that antisemitism had increased — even as Israel has been fighting a seven-front war for its survival.
There is a divide between Jews and the general public. Almost all French Jews believe that not nearly enough has been done to ensure their security — not enough guards stationed at synagogues, Jewish schools, kosher markets and restaurants, and in Jewish neighborhoods. But more than half of the general public believes enough, or even “too much,” is being done to protect Jews. Those who think “too much” is being done to protect Jews are the very people whom Jews need protection from. Many of them, I suspect, are French Muslims.
Regarding the crossover between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, 61% of respondents believed that antisemites were making their ideas more digestible by attacking Israel rather than the Jews.
Of course. Many people are ready to join the chorus of hate directed at the Jewish state, that can be accused — falsely — as guilty of “apartheid” and ‘war crimes” and “genocide,” who would refrain from attacking Jews directly. After the Holocaust, even some antisemites realize that just won’t do.
Thirty-six percent of people believed it was possible to want the destruction of Israel and to not be antisemitic.
This is the most disturbing of all the results from this CRIF/Ipsos poll. More than third of the French people polled allow themselves to believe that you can want Israel to be wiped out — Judea delenda est — all of its Jewish inhabitants expelled or murdered, and yet that does not make you an antisemite. There is no response to this, except a howl of Munchian despair.
nicholas william tesdorf says
We remember the Dreyfus case!
ploome says
going back to Alister Heath
https://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2025/07/alister-heaths-theres-something-about.html
There’s something about Israel that makes people uncomfortable, and it’s not what they say it is.
They’ll point to politics, settlements, borders, and wars. But scratch beneath the outrage, and you’ll find something deeper. A discomfort not with what Israel does, but with what Israel is.
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that Israel is thriving make some people uncomfortable, because Israel challenges the beliefs that a ‘New Israel” have superseded the Jewish people, assuming their role as God’s covenanted people.
Asserting the New Covenant has superseded or replaced the Mosaic covenant and that there is now God’s “New Israel” and another, newer people of God.
Israel shows the world, maybe not.
What Israel has accomplished in less than 80 years, many societies and cultures have not accomplished in millennia.
Maybe there is a higher power watching over.
Alkflaeda says
The decrease in the number of people who thought that anti-Semitism was present may be an indication that anti-Semitic attitudes and behaviours are becoming more mainstream, and hence less remarkable. If this is so, a higher score would actually have been better.