Actor Gerard Depardieu, singer Charles Aznavour and former President Nicolas Sarkozy are among over 250 high-profile French figures urging national action to counter a "new anti-Semitism" that they blame on rising Islamic radicalism.
The initiative includes a manifesto, published Sunday in the Le Parisien newspaper, bringing politicians from the Right and Left together, as well as Jewish, Muslim and Catholic leaders.
The statement urges prominent Muslims to denounce anti-Jewish and anti-Christian references in the Quran as outdated so "no believer can refer to a holy text to commit a crime."
It also calls for combating anti-Semitism "before it's too late."
"Anti-Semitism is not a Jewish affair, it is everyone's affair," the manifesto asserts.
The document was co-authored by Philippe Val, a former editor for weekly satirical publication Charlie Hebdo, whose offices were targeted in a lethal terrorist attack in 2015 by Muslim extremists. The pretext for the Charlie Hebdo attack was a cartoon the magazine had published mocking Islam's Prophet Muhammad.
The manifesto was published less than a month after a Muslim neighbor murdered Jewish Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll in Paris.
"[France] has become a theater of murderous anti-Semitism," said the manifesto. "This terrorism expands, provoking at times popular condemnation and media silence."
"In our recent history," the manifesto began, "11 Jews were murdered, and some were tortured, by radical Islamists, just for being Jewish."
The manifesto noted that 10% of the Jews in the greater Paris region, some 50,000 people, were prompted to flee their homes because of the threat of anti-Semitism, afraid to send their children to school.
"This amounts to a low-grade ethnic cleansing in the country of Émile Zola and [Georges] Clemenceau," the manifesto argued.
Zola, a journalist, and Clemenceau, a politician, both supported Alfred Dreyfus in his controversial late-19th century trial for treason in France. Dreyfus was eventually exonerated after he was convicted of treason due to the anti-Semitic sentiments in France at the time.
Justice Minister Nicole Belloubet said on France Inter radio that the government must be vigilant against anti-Semitism and called for social unity.
