Does France Have an Anti-Semitism Problem?

U.S. media noted this week that the  Jewish   school   shooting   in Toulouse was the worst violent anti-Semitic attack in France “in decades.” They were referring to the 1980 rue Copernic synagogue bombing, which rose to further infamy after then Prime Minister Raymond Barre characterized the attack as “a heinous act against Jews in a synagogue that struck four innocent Frenchmen crossing the street”—again reinforcing the idea that one couldn’t be French and Jewish.

[Furuthermore], the claim that Monday’s shooting was the worst violent attack in “decades” is somewhat misleading, since it glances over the fact that there have been scores of violent anti-Semitic acts in recent years—yes, perhaps not reported by the international press, but certainly on par in horridness.

From this, Levy looks back to what has been the  untouchable assumption of French public life:

. . . after those four years living among the French, I concluded that the country’s nearly religious devotion to secularism is at least a partial explanation for the country’s latent racism and anti-Semitism. It also fosters an ignorance that likely contributed to the perverted mindset of the suspected Toulouse gunman.  Mohammed   Merah  might have been a radical Islamist of Algerian background, but he’s also a French national who grew up in Toulouse.

That’s quite a charge—and, in my opinion, too brash in drawing a direct causal line. But is Levy completely wrong? Is there a sense in which the environment that birthed and sustains laicite—a plain contempt of religious faith and drive to marginalize it at all costs—the same disposition from which other, more sinister prejudices and (ultimately) actions can take as their starting point?