France has made the fight against antisemitism a national priority. The words are repeated in speeches, commemorations and official statements. Yet recent court cases raise a more difficult question: what happens when violence against Jews is punished, while the antisemitic nature of that violence is left unnamed?
On September 14, in Strasbourg, a young woman was convicted over the assault of three Jewish students on a university campus. According to the victims, they were called “fascist Zionists” and “dirty Zionists” during the attack.
The assault was recognized. The antisemitic motive was not.
Prosecutors considered that the violence arose from a political disagreement rather than hostility toward the victims because they were Jewish. The court followed that reasoning.
Strasbourg is not the only case to raise such questions.
In Épinay-sur-Seine, an olive tree planted in memory of Ilan Halimi, the young French Jew kidnapped, tortured and murdered in 2006, was cut down with a chainsaw. Those responsible were convicted, yet the antisemitic nature of the act was not established. An appeals court upheld that conclusion in March 2026.
In Levallois-Perret, a nanny was convicted after pouring toxic household products into food and drinks belonging to the Jewish family that employed her. Here too, the antisemitic aggravating factor was rejected. Prosecutors considered the issue serious enough to bring the case before France’s highest court.
The murder of Sarah Halimi belongs to a different legal category and should be treated as such. The antisemitic nature of the killing was recognized. Her murderer, however, was found criminally irresponsible because his mental state was deemed to have abolished his criminal responsibility at the time of the crime. No criminal trial therefore took place. The Court of Cassation upheld that decision in 2021.
None of these cases is identical. Their legal circumstances differ, sometimes profoundly. Taken together, however, they reveal a recurring difficulty: the difficulty of naming antisemitism when it no longer presents itself in the forms we have learned to recognize.
Not every crime against a Jewish person is antisemitic. Motive cannot be presumed. It has to be established, carefully and rigorously, through evidence.
That rigor is indispensable. It cannot, however, depend on antisemitism announcing itself in the clearest possible terms.
Hatred rarely offers a confession. It reveals itself in language, in the choice of a victim, in the choice of a symbol, in the circumstances of an attack, in the meaning of what is targeted.
Antisemitism, like every hatred that survives, adapts.
A Jew is not always attacked while being called a Jew. Sometimes the word used is “Zionist”. Sometimes hostility toward Jews borrows the vocabulary of Israel, Gaza or “resistance”.
Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism. Opposition to an Israeli government is not antisemitism. Even anti-Zionism cannot simply be treated, in law, as an automatic synonym for antisemitism.
The opposite shortcut is just as dangerous.
The word “Zionist” cannot become a convenient screen behind which antisemitism disappears from view.
When Jewish students are physically assaulted while being called “dirty Zionists”, the political context deserves to be examined. It should not be enough, by itself, to close the question of antisemitism.
The distinction matters far beyond the wording of a judgment.
The way a crime is legally defined affects statistics, police practices, judicial training, public policy and the way a society understands the violence occurring within it. A qualification written into a court decision may appear technical. For the victim, and for the country, it says something much larger about what has been seen and what has not.
When an antisemitic motive exists but is not recognized, the hatred itself does not vanish. Only its name does.
France should therefore examine, seriously and without defensiveness, the way these motives are identified throughout the judicial process. Are police officers, prosecutors and judges sufficiently trained to recognize contemporary forms of antisemitism? Are discriminatory motives documented early enough in investigations? Why do aggravating circumstances sometimes disappear between the initial facts and the final judgment?
These questions do not weaken judicial independence. They belong to the legitimate scrutiny of a justice system that must be capable not only of punishing an act, but of understanding its nature.
France knows how to remember.
It gathers before plaques. It lays wreaths. It pronounces the names of the dead. It repeats, solemnly, that nothing must ever be forgotten.
Memory, however, cannot become a refuge from the present.
“Never again” has meaning only if we remain capable of recognizing hatred when it changes its language.
Strasbourg, Épinay-sur-Seine, Levallois-Perret and, in a different legal context, Sarah Halimi are not one and the same story.
Their accumulation nevertheless leaves an uncomfortable impression: a country can condemn violence while still hesitating to name the hatred that produced it.
That hesitation deserves to be examined.
Because when antisemitism becomes harder to recognize precisely as it becomes more visible, the question is no longer only one of legal vocabulary.
It is a question of what France is prepared to see.
The writer is Executive Director of European Affairs for the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM).