paris (jta) | European Jews expressed a mixture of anger and frustration this week as violence erupted in Europe and the Middle East over a Muslim cartoon.

As frequent targets of anti-Semitic cartoons — many of them in the Arab press — Jews on one hand sympathized with the Muslim outrage over depictions of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, which is considered by Muslims to be blasphemous.

But Jews also joined many others in expressing shock at the level of violence the controversy sparked.

“Of course, we condemn all forms of propaganda that carry prejudice toward any faith. But people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” said Serge Cwajgenbaum, the secretary-general of the European Jewish Congress.

In Denmark, Jews felt solidarity with their country as it came under attack after a Danish newspaper printed the controversial cartoons, including one that depicted the Islamic prophet Muhammad as wearing a turban shaped as a bomb.

“Usually the Jews are always in the center of things, but here we feel we are part of the Danish population,” said Rabbi Bent Lexner, Denmark’s chief rabbi.

Other newspapers across the world — in France, Australia and the United States — printed one or more of the cartoons. In France, the editorial director of France Soir, was fired after running at least one of the cartoons. At least one Israeli paper, the Jerusalem Post, also reprinted the cartoons.

Most European Jews, led by France’s chief rabbi, Joseph Sitruk, saw the original cartoons as a needless provocation.

Following a meeting with French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, Sitruk said, “We win nothing by disparaging religions, humiliating them by making caricatures of them.”

Freedom of expression is not an unlimited right, Sitruk said. The right to satire “stops as soon as there is incitement to or hatred of the other.”

Jews are no strangers to racism dressed up as humor, said David Ruzie, a French university professor and specialist in international law.

“There is humor, and there is humor,” Ruzie said. “It was through derision that Germany, and in France as well, before World War II, began to attack Jews.”

But there was widespread condemnation of the Muslim reaction, which in addition to the anti-Semitic cartoons, included Muslim violence, throwing rocks at Danish and other European institutions abroad and, in some cases, setting buildings ablaze.

This is not the first example of religious slander in the European media, but the reactions are exaggerated, said Jean-Michel Rosenfeld, a Paris official. “There is something to be angry over, just like when Catholics were furious over caricatures of the Holy Trinity in the French press,” he said, “but the Catholics did not go out and burn buildings.”

For some elderly Danish Jews, the violence brought back some historical nightmares, said Lexner.

“I think that there are some kinds of fear, especially of those people who have seen this burning of flags and violence in the many countries, and they compare” that to the 1940s, fretting that “things are repeating themselves,” he said.

Many European and American Jewish observers noted the irony of Muslims and Arabs objecting to an offensive characterization of Muhammad when anti-Jewish characterizations are rampant in the Arab world.

It shows “how bizarre and insidious this all is. If they understand that it’s hurtful, why didn’t they pay attention to it ever before,” said Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League who has often pressed the issue of anti-Semitism in the Arab media.

JTA staff writer Chanan Tigay in New York and correspondents Dinah A. Spritzer in Prague, Lauren Elkin and Brett Kline in Paris, and Toby Axelrod in Berlin contributed to this report.