A few days ago, Julien Bensimhon, a Parisian lawyer, fell into conversation with a Jewish neighbour in the staircase of the building where his practice is located: she wanted to know whether it was safe to continue to display a mezuzah, a traditional decorative case, on the front door of her flat. “She is really worried that people will come and attack her,” he said.
Bensimhon understood: he, too, is Jewish, and members of his own family were among the 70,000 French Jews deported from the country during the Second World War and murdered by the Nazis.
