Long before Chérif Kouachi burst into the offices of Charlie Hebdo last Wednesday with his brother Saïd to assassinate the journalists and cartoonists gathered at the satirical magazine’s weekly editorial meeting, he had a dream. Mr. Kouachi wanted, according to testimony given at a 2008 court hearing, to “burn synagogues,” “vandalize Jewish stores in Paris” and “terrorize the Jews.” We know that dream was shared by Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman who laid siege to a kosher supermarket in Paris on Friday and killed four of the terrified hostages — Yoav Hattab, Yohan Cohen, Philippe Braham and François-Michel Saada — for one reason: They were Jews.

In 2012, the French Islamist Mohammed Merah murdered three students and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse. In May, the Syria-returned Frenchman Mehdi Nemmouche killed four people in an attack on a Jewish museum in Brussels.

Anti-Semitism manifested its hateful ways again last summer when synagogues and Jewish-owned shops were attacked in and near Paris after Israel’s incursion into Gaza. The destruction of Jewish businesses recalled painful images of past suffering endured by Europe’s Jews, including the violent attacks on Jewish merchants on Kristallnacht, the infamous night of Nov. 9, 1938, which was the beginning of the Nazi pogrom against Austrian and German Jews. In France, 75,000 French Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

It is no wonder that feelings of insecurity and isolation have resurfaced, and that some French Jews are asking themselves if they have a future in France, home to Europe’s largest Jewish population. Many have already left for Israel — nearly 7,000 last year — and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who attended the march in Paris on Sunday, urged more French Jews to do so, telling them: “Israel is your home.”