The Paris terrorist attacks have horrified the civilized world. The deaths of artists and journalists have rightfully captured the attention of most people throughout the West. But the attacks were not only against the employees of Charlie Hebdo, they were also against innocent Parisians in a food market who had nothing at all to do with the publication of the images the terrorists found offensive. The shoppers had committed a different offense: They were Jewish.

I usually try to be as objective in this column as I can be, but I cannot be objective in this matter because I, too, am Jewish. I have lived with anti-Semitism all my life.

Fortunately, the prejudice that I have experienced has never reached the level of violence. Indeed, it has usually been quite mild. It has taken the form of being barred from membership in a New York City lunch club, being refused admission to a suburban Philadelphia tennis club at which my college team was playing, being refused a room, for which I had a reservation, in a seashore Massachusetts hotel. Over the years I have learned to take such things for what they are: examples of stupid bigotry and a negative reflection not on me but on the people who behave in this way.

The attacks on the Jewish shoppers in Paris have not elicited quite as much global reaction as have the attacks on Charlie Hebdo. Perhaps, people are more used to attacks on Jews. They are nothing new. Perhaps, there are those who think that Jews are fair targets because of Israeli policies towards Palestinians (although not all Jews support such Israeli policies — I certainly do not).

Or, perhaps, the symbolic nature of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo as attacks on the basic right of freedom of speech has played a role. But for a Jew born in the 20th century, raised in the shadows of the Holocaust, the focus of terrorism on people just because they are Jewish is very frightening.

On one level, I find the easiest way to understand the terrorist focus on Jews is to recognize that these terrorists are simply evil. I heard one commentator on the news describe members of these terrorist groups as members of a “death cult.” Terrorists not only kill Jews, they kill innocents of all faiths and all nationalities, including Islam. Nevertheless, every time there is a new attack on Jews simply because they are Jews, I am reminded of the special danger Jews face in the new world of global terrorism.

Having said all this, I also want to point out something else about these attacks. After the attacks occurred, television stations broadcast a moving image that has stayed in my consciousness. The image is of a French soldier standing in front of the market where the attack occurred with tears in his eyes holding a bouquet of flowers as a memorial to those who had been killed there. France has had a long history of accepting and, on occasion, promoting anti-Semitism. To see a French soldier offering flowers to the memory of the dead innocents at that market makes me hope that the attacks may have had an unintended consequence that the terrorist killers would hate.

If the attack on those Jewish shoppers has made ordinary non-Jewish French citizens feel a closer kinship with their Jewish neighbors, then, ironically, this horrible act of savagery will have helped to weaken the lingering evil of anti-Semitism.