Galliano's racist abuse familiar in Jewish quarter

Like most Paris schools, the Ecole des Hospitalieres-Saint-Gervais bears a sombre plaque. It reads: "165 Jewish children from this school, deported to Germany during the World War II, were exterminated in the Nazi camps. Do not forget."

In this district, known as the Marais, the heart of Paris's oldest Jewish quarter, gay bars rub shoulders with falafel cafes, kosher restaurants, synagogues and prayer rooms.

Its labyrinthine streets have been home to Jews on and off since the 13th century. Ten days ago, however, it also played host to John Galliano.

The alleged infamous outburst of the Dior designer, who has now been sacked, in which he is said to have abused a Jewish woman and her Asian boyfriend, was offensive on many levels - not only because of what he allegedly said, but because of where he said it.

It was in a bar just a few paces from the Hospitalieres-Saint-Gervais that the couturier was arrested and where he was filmed, last year, telling two women he believed to be Jewish that he loved Hitler.

His reported behaviour has shocked France and the fashion world. Yet in what locals call the pletzl - "little place" in Yiddish - it provoked little surprise. Local residents and traders say that the insult "sale Juif" (dirty Jew) is a fact of daily life; asking a local if they have suffered abuse provokes a quizzical stare as if you are trying to be funny. "Bien sur" ("of course") is the most common reply.

"It's stating the obvious," says one kippah-wearing youngster in the Rue des Rosiers, the Jewish quarter's main street. "We hear what Galliano said, or versions of it, every day, sometimes several times every day."

He prefers not to be named.

Standing in the doorway of a grocery shop, Dan points to his wide-brimmed black hat. "My 80-year-old neighbour told me that when she was growing up they used to say we Jews wore these hats to hide our horns, and long black coats to hide our tails," he says, laughing.

At the Sacha Finkelsztajn pastry shop, famous for its apple strudel and cheesecake, two women shrug when Galliano's alleged anti-Semitic diatribe is mentioned. Over the road in the Panzer, a grocery store, the shop assistant refuses to talk about Galliano. "We're always being called 'dirty Jews'; there's always been anti-Semitism here and there always will be. It upsets me, but it doesn't shock me."

In La Perle, the trendy bar where the designer - who denies being antiSemitic - was arrested after another alleged outburst, Jerome says: "France invented the term 'anti-Semitism'."

Like a sore that never completely heals, anti-Semitism erupts in France, which has the biggest Jewish community in Europe, with depressing regularity.

At the time of Nazi occupation in 1940, as many as 9000 Jews lived in the Marais. Many of them were among the estimated 76,000 French Jews who were deported between 1942 and 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where most were exterminated on arrival.

In 1982, after a terrorist bomb planted outside the Copernic synagogue in Paris killed four people - only one of them Jewish - the then Prime Minister, Raymond Barre, spoke of "a heinous act" that had struck "innocent French people". When a British-born rabbi, Michael Williams, tried to visit the injured in hospital, he says he was told: "Get the hell out of here. You're responsible for this."

Then, in 2006, a 23-year-old mobile-phone salesman was kidnapped and tortured for three weeks before being left for dead because he was Jewish and his Muslim attackers assumed his family had money.

Until recently the extreme-right Front National of Jean-Marie Le Pen was the political face of anti-Semitism in France. Since his daughter, Marine, became leader, it has moved away from historical revisionism and has its sights on France's Muslim population, also the biggest on the continent.

In the Marais, many Jews now blame anti-Semitism on immigrants from France's former north African colonies, and on the country's traditional special relationship with Arab countries.

The Jewish community's Protection Service documented 466 reported anti-Semitic incidents in 2010 - down from a 10-year peak of 974 in 2004 - but says many more go unreported. It says most attacks can be linked to Muslim fundamentalists and events in the Middle East.

A French newspaper website recently asked: "Is France ready for a Jewish president?" Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund and a potential candidate in next year's presidential elections, was recently described by an opponent as "cosmopolitan" and "not the image of rural France", both well-known French euphemisms for being Jewish.

Jerome believes the idea of the "enemy within" is a cause of anti-Semitism that is unique to France. "I think it makes some people angry that Jewish people are so well integrated that, while they know we are here, they don't know who we are."

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