Newly-appointed French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal. Photo: Reuters/Stephanie Lecocq

France on Tuesday appointed its youngest ever prime minister who is also the first openly gay man to hold the post — and the fourth incumbent of Jewish origin in the country’s history.

Gabriel Attal, 34, was announced as the new prime minister by President Emmanuel Macron, following the resignation last week of his predecessor, Elisabeth Borne. Attal previously served as the spokesperson for the center-right government and most recently as education minister.

Born to a Russian Orthodox mother, Attal did not grow up in the Jewish faith. However, his late father, Yvan Attal, a successful lawyer and film producer, was a Tunisian Jew. In interviews with the news outlet Liberation in 2019 and the magazine Gala in 2021, the younger Attal talked about an awareness of antisemitism from an early age that came from his father.

“My father told me: ‘You may not be Jewish (I’m Russian Orthodox through my mother), but all your life you’ll feel solidarity with the Jews, because you’ll suffer the same antisemitism as a result of your name,'” Attal recalled.

“In this respect, I receive everything — homophobia of course, antisemitism too,” he continued.  “There’s no shortage of that. But I’ll never complain.”

In Jan. 2021, Attal decided to go public about the hatred targeting him when he received an anonymous letter riddled with antisemitic and homophobic invective, including the insult “youpin,” a derogatory French term for “Jew.”

“I’m not in the habit of relaying the filth I receive, but in this case I’m making an exception,” Attal posted on Instagram alongside images of the letter, which included a Nazi-era yellow Star of David drawn on the envelope.

More recently, as education minister, Attal paid a solidarity visit to a Jewish school in the suburbs of Paris five days after the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in southern Israel. Noting that his ministry had received several messages from Jewish students facing antisemitic harassment, Attal pledged to “let nothing past.”

“The priority is to ensure security and calm in our schools,” he said. He also referred one incident, in which a Jewish boy was attacked by a classmate, to the Public Prosecutor for further action.

Attal is the fourth French prime minister of Jewish origin, following Borne, whose father was a Holocaust survivor, as well as Léon Blum, who served during the 1930s and 1940s, and Pierre Mendès France, who held the office during the 1950s.