France prides itself on its big Jewish community. It has a strong law against anti-Semitic speech, and recent synagogue vandalism has been been put down mainly to anger in the big Muslim community over Israeli government policies.

But an old and sinister hostility towards Jews has also recently bubbled up to the surface, serving as a reminder of ugly periods in France's past. The latest instance is a vitriolic new book that uses 1930s style innuendo to blacken Bernard Kouchner, the Foreign Minister.

In the most chilling anti-semitic incident, in December, a sulphurous stand-up comedian called Dieudonné gave an award to Robert Faurisson, a notorious denier of the Holocaust. The 5,000 audience at the Paris Zenith theatre applauded as "a Jew" with a yellow star of David, handed him the award.

Diedonné is of African origin and has lately allied himself with Jean-Marie Le Pen, the xenophobic boss of the far-right Front National. The comedian is partly behind a vicious campaign against Arthur Essebag, a star television presenter and producer.

On Saturday, Arthur - who uses only that name - took half a page in Le Monde to denounce a campaign against him on the false pretext that he helps finance the Israeli army.

"Zionist ...finance ...money, it's all there...For the first time in my life, I discover this form of hatred," he wrote. "Never would I have imagined that in my own country, they would demonstrate against me solely because I am Jewish."

The book on Dr Kouchner, the ageing rock star of President Sarkozy's cabinet, is particularly revealing because there is no link with the Arab-Israeli conflict and because some of the chattering classes are defending the offensive tones of Pierre Péan, its author.

"The World According to K" reports on consulting work that Dr Kouchner, a humanitarian campaigner, carried out for African dictators. Péan paints him as a money-mad outsider whose main motivation springs from his Jewish origins. The Foreign Minister loathes France and has "sold off" French interests to the United States, he writes. Dr Kouchner is driven by "hatred for the values of the French Revolution, of the wartime Resistance, of a national independence that is detested in the name of an Anglo-Saxon cosmopolitanism."

That kind of language was used against supposed Jewish enemies of France in the Dreyfus affair of the late 1890s and in the 1930s and 40s. As was the case elsewhere in Europe, Jews were depicted as aliens who worked against the interest of the nation. Even Mr Le Pen would think twice before using the old anti-Semitic codeword "cosmopolitan".

Dr Kouchner has damned the book as sickening and redolent of the 1930s and President Sarkozy - himself the target of some anti-Semitism due to his Jewish ancestry - has stood by him. Some media have attacked Péan's language. Le Monde called it a loathsome cocktail from the old far right.

But the book has not been widely discredited, and Dr Kouchner has been damaged. Péan is denying that he wrote anything anti-Semitic and he is being backed by sections of the press - and by many in the blogosphere. Le Journal du Dimanche, the main Sunday paper, said that he was not anti-Semitic but that the targets of his investigative books often cried anti-semitism "as a pretext".

Foreign journalists are often charged with anti-French prejudice when they touch the dangerous groud of anti-Semitism. So I shall leave the conclusion to Jean-Michel Aphatie, the toughest political interviewer on French radio. "It takes a lot of bad faith to continue to defend the indefensible book of Pierre Péan," he said.

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