[Robert Goldmann is a journalist with extensive experience in Europe and in American-Jewish organizations.]

The “new anti-Semitism” — a major topic last year — is not all that new, nor is postwar “European anti-Semitism” a helpful or accurate synonym. Most of the hundreds of attacks on Jews and their institutions in Europe in the past four years have occurred in France, along with foot dragging in combating them until mid-2004.

Thus, Jewish attention must be focused on France when we discuss the revival of the plague many thought had ended or at least been curbed by the lessons of the Holocaust. Meanwhile, France has been permitted by its fellow members of the European Union to become the EU’s unofficial but actual leader, particularly on foreign policy.

The French explanation for the wave of anti-Semitism of the past four years is that extreme elements of France’s 6 million Arab immigrants — not France as a nation –– are responsible for creating fear or unease among the 600,000 French Jews. While Muslims are the perpetrators, they certainly are not in charge of a government and a national police that for 3½ years either looked the other way or was ineffective. This is what is not new and calls for a look at history.

Over the past 150 years, French Jews were freer and their emancipation came earlier than the rest of Europe. Integration of Jews was part of implementing the “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” that also inspired the founders of the United States.

Alongside this impressive history, however, France has been plagued by persistent anti-Semitism and right-wing extremism that rarely gained outright power but are significant in French politics and society.

Looking at the past 125 years, the Dreyfus trial stands out as a major landmark of this trend. The Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus was tried and convicted for alleged espionage. The charge had been concocted by top elements of the French army, aided and abetted by some of the country’s leading publicists. Only independent investigation by a small group of journalists, notably Emile Zola, and their unmasking of the “plot” as a fabrication led to a new trial and exoneration of the Jewish officer.

Anti-Semitism, or its tolerance by the social and political elite, manifested itself again in the 1930s in the persons of pro-appeasement, fascist-leaning Edouard Daladier and Pierre Laval, the prime minister and foreign minister during Hitler’s rise to power. They represented a morally decayed society whose army could not withstand Hitler’s Wehrmacht.

The German victory led to the creation of a Nazi-style government headed by World War I hero Marshal Henri-Philippe Petain in part of occupied France. Under this regime, 75,000 of the then 250,000 Jews were sent to the death camps. (Many thousands of others either fled or were hidden by a remarkable number of courageous citizens in small communities, mostly in the south of the country.)

In the wake of liberation, there was no Nuremberg-type trial. Free French leader Gen. Charles deGaulle showed no interest in dealing with the mass murder of the Jews. Thus, men like Maurice Papon, who had organized the deportation of 2,000 Jews from Bordeaux, could glide smoothly into postwar administrations. Papon rose as high as to police chief of Paris....

The roots of France’s ambivalence toward Jews and Israel lie in its inheritance of World War II, with which the society has still not come to grips. French people were aided in shying away by America’s and Britain’s recognition of France as a victorious power in the war, despite the marginal contribution of Free French Forces to the Allied war effort. Permanent member status in the United Nations and veto power added to France’s grand image of itself.

Not until its governments and leading institutions face the nation’s war and early postwar record, as Germany has done, will France be able to shed the illusion of victory and big power status to begin solving its problems, including but not limited to the relations with its Jewish community and Israel.