PARIS — He was one of France’s few public intellectuals to express support for the Yellow Vest movement at the beginning, but last week he said the protesters “devastate without regard for anything or anybody.”

Over the weekend, they turned their ire on him.

As Alain Finkielkraut, one of France’s leading essayists and critics from the right, walked by a Yellow Vest demonstration, protesters at its edge shouted insults widely condemned as anti-Semitic.

“Fascist!” they yelled.“Palestine!” “Go home to Israel!” “Tel Aviv, back to Tel Aviv!”

By Monday, the affair had snowballed into another episode of anguished national soul-searching over the problem of persistent anti-Semitism in France, and the evolution of the Yellow Vest movement from gas-tax protest to violent street revolt with hints of menace and hooliganism.

Some politicians and intellectuals accused others of not condemning the insults to Mr. Finkielkraut firmly enough. President Emmanuel Macron telephoned him to express his anger, but said he would not be attending a march in Paris scheduled for Tuesday to condemn anti-Semitism.

The march, the accusations and counteraccusations, and the insults themselves are a recurring feature of public life in France, where the Interior Ministry last week reported a 74-percent rise in anti-Semitic incidents nationally.

The extreme sensitivity of the issue was evident again Monday in the recriminations that poured down on those whose condemnation was judged not severe enough. A lawyer with connections to Mr. Macron was forced to apologize for seeming to take the epithets too lightly in a television interview.

The affair crystallizes a number of dark elements bubbling to the surface in a climate of public tension in France, even beyond the Yellow Vest protests, now in their 14th week, whose economic resentments sometimes elide with anti-Semitism.

Mr. Finkielkraut, the son of an Auschwitz survivor and a member of the Académie Française, one of the country’s oldest cultural institutions, is a polarizing figure. His views on politics and France’s immigrants put him well to the right in the country’s political spectrum.

Apart from displaying his erudition as a critic deeply knowledgeable about French literature and philosophy, Mr. Finkielkraut regularly inveighs, on a popular weekly radio program, against what he considers the lack of respect for traditional French culture in France’s immigrant communities. He has lamented the incursion of these communities into hitherto all-French zones, and often speaks out about the anti-Semitism in France’s Muslim suburbs.

Some of the virulence directed at him Saturday could perhaps be explained by these positions, though analysts said there was no doubt that anti-Semitism also played a role. The Yellow Vest movement has been criticized for its lack of diversity and for not raising the problems of longstanding poverty in France’s heavily immigrant suburbs, or banlieues.

The movement has been fueled by economic and class resentments, particularly over elitism and inequality, and mostly among white working-class French in small towns and rural areas.

Muttering about the “Rothschild bank” can frequently be heard at the edges of the demonstrations, mixed in with expressions of hatred toward the president.

Mr. Macron was a banker at Rothschild and Company. But the invocation of Rothschild has also become a kind of anti-Semitic code for the supposed influence of Jews over the economy.

Mr. Finkielkraut was in the cross hairs of several of these currents on Saturday, as he stepped out to take his mother-in-law home from lunch and crossed the now-weekly Yellow Vest demonstration near his home on the Left Bank.

Citizen videos, which have run continually on French television, make clear what happened next: Several in the crowd, recognizing Mr. Finkielkraut from his frequent television appearances, began yelling insults.

One man was particularly virulent: Tugging at a sort of kaffiyeh scarf, he yelled: “France belongs to us! Damn racist! You are a hatemonger. You are going to die. You are going to hell. God will punish you. The people will punish you. Damn Zionist!”

The intentions of some in the crowd were clear, Mr. Finkielkraut said. “I think some of them wanted to beat the hell out of me,” he told the television station LCI.

“There was a pogrom-like violence about it,” Mr. Finkielkraut said, though he noted that “one of them accompanied me so that I would escape from my aggressors.” The ones who wanted to harm him had “faces full of hatred,” he said.

Mr. Macron, writing on Twitter, said, “The anti-Semitic insults he was subjected to are the absolute negation of what we are and what makes us of a great nation.”

The Paris prosecutor’s office said it was opening a criminal investigation into “public insults attributable to origin, ethnicity, nationality, race or religion.” France’s interior minister said Mr. Finkielkraut’s principal antagonist had been identified by the authorities.

The barrage aimed at Mr. Finkielkraut combined elements of traditional French anti-Semitism, deeply rooted in the writing and thinking of many of the country’s greatest writers, and the so-called new anti-Semitism of the country’s Muslim suburbs.

“It’s a mix of the two,” said Laurent Joly, one of France’s leading historians of anti-Semitism and the author of numerous books on the subject. “It’s quite striking, and it’s the first time.”

“It’s a kind of hybrid phenomenon, a sort of intellectual confusion,” he said.

The insults combined anti-Semitism, hatred of elites and anger at Republican institutions. That made for a close parallel with the political anti-Semitism of the late 19th century, in Mr. Joly’s view.

“It’s a hatred of the elites that are in place,” the historian said. “Before, Jews were accused of being the winners in the Republic. It’s a little bit now what were hearing, with all this talk against the Rothschilds.’’

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