ARIS, Aug. 30 - The police arrested a Jewish former employee on Monday in connection with a recent arson attack on a Jewish community center here, suggesting that the attack was not a neo-Nazi act as originally assumed.
If the 52-year-old man, who was notidentified, is found guilty of setting fire to the center, it would be the third case in less than two months in which apparently anti-Semitic acts turned out to be the work of disturbed individuals seeking attention, rather than of neo-Nazis or others pursuing an anti-Semitic agenda.
"These isolated individuals wanting to give value to themselves call on the collective causes of society and at this moment anti-Semitism is in play," said François de Singly, a sociologist at France's National Council for Scientific Research.
The recent hoaxes threaten to overshadow the hundreds of real acts of anti-Semitism that have occurred this year.
A sharp rise in anti-Semitic acts in the last four years, some committed by avowed neo-Nazis and others by Arab youths, has caused anxiety among the country's estimated 600,000 Jews. The pace of such acts has accelerated since April, raising fears that the two strains of anti-Semitism were spreading among a new generation in France.
"If people are simulating anti-Semitic acts, it's because we are in a climate in which anti-Semitic acts are believable," said Roger Benarrosh, vice president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France, or CRIF. He said the hoaxes should not detract from the fact that there has been a resurgence of anti-Semitism in France.
This year through July, the Justice Ministry registered 298 anti-Semitic acts in France, 160 of them violent, more than double the number reported in the same period last year. The French branch of the World Jewish Congress said its figures put the number of incidents so far this year at 375.
The hate is coming from several directions.
Some analysts say the encroachment of globalization on national cultures has reawakened Europe's latent anti-Semitism among France's alienated white youth. Others attribute the growing anti-Semitism to a pro-Palestinian bias in French media coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Some people say it is spreading from Germany.
"One source is the traditional extreme right, which is represented in the French political arena by the National Front, then you have the extreme left, which is anti-Zionist and gives a kind of legitimacy to anti-Semitism," said Roger Cukierman, the president of CRIF. "Then you have pro-Palestinian Muslim youths who are facing the problem of nonintegration in French society, and they are looking for scapegoats."
The trend has alarmed French politicians and tainted the country's carefully cultivated postwar identity as an increasingly multicultural land of tolerance. France has passed a stiff new law that threatens penalties of up to life in prison for some religious or racially motivated crimes. After the fire at the Paris center, the city's mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, said he would spend 300,000 euros, about $360,000, to secure Jewish sites.
But the issue has been muddled by the arrest on Monday and by other high-profile incidents in which apparent anti-Semitic acts turned out to have more complex motivations.
In July, a 23-year-old French woman, Marie Leblanc, stunned the nation by claiming that Muslim youths had attacked her and her child on a suburban commuter train and had drawn swastikas on her stomach. She soon confessed to making up the story, leading to criticism of French officials for quickly lending credence to her claims.
Earlier this month, dozens of tombstones in a cemetery in the southern French city of Lyon were scrawled with swastikas and anti-Semitic slurs.
A week later, a man turned himself in to the police and said he had written the graffiti because his earlier attack with a hatchet on a Muslim man in Lyon had not prompted the news media response that he had wanted. He said he had decided to desecrate the Jewish graves when a similar neo-Nazi incident in the northern French region of Alsace made the front pages of newspapers across the country.
The Aug. 22 fire in Paris also made headlines, and drew swift reactions from French politicians. Swastikas and statements like, "The world would be pure if there were no more Jews," had been written inside the building before it was set ablaze, suggesting that it was a neo-Nazi attack. Justice Minister Dominique Perben called for a "war on racism."
But on Monday, the police said they had taken a mentally unstable Jew into custody on suspicion that he set the fire. They said the man had worked as a watchman at the center, which prepared kosher meals for needy Jews.
