Lord Sacks revealed that British police had thwarted a terror plot targeting Jews in Manchester. Photo: Twitter

Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former British Chief Rabbi, has told the BBC that the greatest threat currently facing British Jews comes from radical Islamists.

“I think so,” Lord Sacks said, when asked whether Islamists presented the greatest security challenge to the community. “Be aware though, just how small a minority that is of the Muslim community.”

Lord Sacks also revealed that a terror plot against the Jewish community in Manchester had been foiled by police.

The plot, he said, “would have targeted synagogues and Jewish schools, and luckily that was thwarted by the police. So this is not just a scare about nothing – this is very real.”

Lord Sacks pointed out that several recent terrorist attacks, such as the slaughter of a rabbi and three young children at a Jewish school in the French city of Toulouse in 2012, and a gun assault in 2014 on the Jewish museum in Brussels in which four people were murdered, were carried out by “radical Islamists. All of them incidentally born in France. So the connection there is quite self-evident.”