Anti-Semitism on the March Across Europe

Among these, there was one incident of "extreme violence", in which a Jewish family was attacked at a petrol station.

As a female member of the family went inside to pay, she was intentionally run over by a car containing two white women, who then got out of the vehicle, shouted "dirty Jew" and spat on the injured woman before driving away.

Mark Gardner, a spokesman for the CST, said the high number of incidents reflected a strong Jewish community with the confidence to report attacks.

"It's not simply the case that Manchester is a much more anti-Semitic than London," he said. "What you have here is a highly visible Orthodox Jewish population within an area that is not good for crime," he said.

He claimed that an analysis of the statistics showed that they rose when "trigger events" took place either within, or involving, the Middle East. These included the September 11 attacks in New York, the invasion of Afghanistan and the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

"The significant increase in anti-Semitic instances really occurred after the year 2000 and it seems to be a post-millennium phenomenon not seen on the same level in the 10 or 20 years before," he said.

"It's very difficult to quantify something like this, as I am sure that the reporting rates have improved greatly over the years. However, Jewish communities across the world, with perhaps the exception of some in eastern Europe, reported the same findings outside of 2000.

"What we've seen is that Middle Eastern conflicts drive up the level of anti-Semitism and they have occurred so regularly as to not allow it to drop back to the lower levels of the 1990s.

"It's these trigger events that set off an increase in attacks, often due to some form of directionless anger. Something happens in the news and, before you know it, the nutters come out of the woodwork."