If France cannot protect its Jews, European order may soon fall alongside it - opinion

A republic that cannot protect its town halls will not long protect its synagogues.

This past Saturday, rioters set fire to the nineteenth-century town hall in Limoges. Across France, shops were looted, police officers attacked, and public buildings damaged. The interior minister has acknowledged that police lost control in several cities.

That same weekend, worshippers at the Ohalei Yaakov congregation in Paris's nineteenth arrondissement arrived to find prayer books and tefillin strewn across the floor and their rabbi's office ransacked.

The community believes it was an attempted burglary. Perhaps it was. But Jews have learned that motive is cold comfort when the sacred lies on the floor. What matters is the climate that makes such things possible: a climate in which the street, not the ballot box or the courtroom, increasingly decides what happens in France.

France has always argued in public, and sometimes violently. The Revolution, 1968, and the yellow vests each changed the course of the nation. Defiance of authority is part of the French inheritance. But a line separates a society that challenges its institutions from one that burns them.

Edmund Burke, watching the Revolution from across the Channel, warned that "rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years." France crossed that line this weekend, in Limoges and elsewhere.

For French Jews, this is not abstract. In 1791, France became the first country in Europe to grant Jews full civil rights. It was the Revolution's noblest promise. Today that promise is guarded by soldiers. The interior ministry recorded 1,320 antisemitic incidents last year, more than half of all anti-religious acts in the country. Armed guards outside Jewish schools have become as ordinary as bus stops. France deserves credit for providing that protection. But a guard at a school gate is a symptom, not a cure. A community that can only pray under protection is not fully free.

The political climate has not helped. Debate about Israel in France has too often slid from criticism into something cruder, and the line between opposing a foreign government and resenting one's Jewish neighbors has blurred. When the street becomes the arena of politics, those already marked as targets are the first to feel it.

We have seen this before. In 1819, the Hep-Hep riots swept the German states, and mobs angry at Jewish emancipation attacked Jewish homes and shops. France in 2026 is not Germany in 1819. But the lesson holds: when the authorities lose the street, minorities lose their safety first, and everyone else loses it soon after.

That is why my concern is not only for Jews. France is the keystone of Europe's political and economic order. If Paris cannot keep the peace, Europe's confidence in its own institutions will crack with it. Order is not the enemy of liberty. It is the condition for it.

Three things must follow. Those who burned and looted must face justice, swiftly and visibly. The ransacking at Ohalei Yaakov must be fully investigated, whatever the motive turns out to be. And French leaders across the spectrum must stop treating the street as a legitimate extension of parliament.

France gave Europe the Rights of Man. It must now prove it can guarantee them on an ordinary Saturday night.

Chief Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt is the president of the Conference of European Rabbis (CER), the primary rabbinical alliance in Europe. It unites more than 900 religious leaders of the mainstream synagogue communities in Europe. The conference is designed to maintain and defend the religious rights of Jews in Europe and has become the voice of Judaism for the European continent.