In many ways, France's first Jewish prime minister was typically French: He was a leftist intellectual, lawyer and writer as well as assimilated and mostly nonobservant.
France has the largest Jewish and Muslim populations living side by side outside Israel. Over the past six decades, tensions between the two have increased.
Better known as the alternate address for popes in the 14th century, Avignon was in fact those same Christian religious leaders who offered refuge to exiled French Jews.