Det er en særpræget oplevelse at se en demonstration på ti mand på Stortorget buh’et ud af 1000 muslimer og venstreekstremister, der kun ønsker at flå hovedet af dem. Kun politiet sikrer demokratiets silketynde fernis. Det kræver sin mand at stå der. Peter Seier Christensen er kemiingeniør.

“The Paris of Woody Allen no longer exists.”

Lang, foruroligende, fremragende artikel i det nye nummer af Vanity Fair: The Troubling Question in the French Jewish Community: Is It Time to Leave? Hvad angår jødernes skæbne i Europa, og særlig i Frankrig, vil jeg minde om noget det mest manende og indtrængende, man kan høre om det. Rabbiner Haim Dynovisz i »Europe: A civillisation that has sold it’s dignity«

The most troubling question in the French Jewish community is also the most obvious one: “Is it time to leave?” I asked Roger Cukierman, the head of the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France, or CRIF, the umbrella group for secular Jewish organizations in France.

I expected him to equivocate, but, by way of an answer, he quickly reeled off some of the horrors that have plagued the Jews of Europe during the last decade: the case of Ilan Halimi, a cell-phone salesman kidnapped, brutally tortured, and killed in the Paris suburbs by a gang in 2006 for being Jewish; the 2012 murders of three small children and one adult at point-blank range at the Ozar Hatorah school, in Toulouse, by Mohamed Merah; the 2014 slaughter at the Brussels Jewish Museum; the deadly attack at the synagogue in Copenhagen in February of this year. This March, Merah’s stepbrother was pictured in the New York Post in his camouflage ISIS togs pronouncing a death sentence, as a pre-pubescent boy beside him pulled the trigger in the videotaped execution of the 19-year-old Israeli Arab Muhamed Musalam. Then there are the riots. As Cukierman told The Telegraph last summer, “They are not screaming ‘Death to the Israelis’ on the streets of Paris. They are screaming ‘Death to the Jews.’ ”

To get a better idea of why Ghozlan decided to leave, I went to visit his friend and colleague Yossi Malka, a retired businessman who works for the B.N.V.C.A. Malka met me at the commuter rail station at Stains, a suburb in Le Neuf Trois. If you didn’t know better, you could be in parts of Queens or the Bronx. Here are the same gray projects, laundry flung over the balconies.

Malka wore a worn brown leather jacket, a natty tie, and a fedora—what I think of as the uniform of the banlieues—and drove me to Sarcelles, 20 minutes away and part of what is called the Red Belt, a string of suburban towns, many with Communist or Socialist mayors historically but, now, an expanding National Front. “This is not the Paris of Woody Allen,” Malka told me as we approached a small synagogue ringed by low apartment buildings topped with satellite dishes. “That Paris no longer exists.”

Lord Sacks: If the Jews leave Europe, the continent will have lost its soul