The following piece of mine appears in today's Daily Telegraph:

Next Wednesday, England play Andorra in a qualification match for the 2008 European Championships. I am rather surprised that nobody has yet asked me which team I want to win. Surprised, because all sorts of people have asked me the same question about England's match tomorrow.

I was born, bred and brought up in London. I have only ever lived in England. I make clear to anyone who will listen that there is no logical reason for England to be in a union with Scotland and that we should wave the ungrateful, sclerotic, subsidy-junkie nation goodbye. I even have an obsession with the music of Sir Edward Elgar.

So why should anyone be in doubt as to which team I want to win tomorrow?

For one reason: I am Jewish, and tomorrow England play Israel. And although, for most Englishmen, their support for the national football team is a given, for Jews, apparently, it is not.

It seems Norman Tebbit may have been on to something when he identified his "cricket test" in 1990. As he put it at the time: "A large proportion of Britain's Asian population fail to pass the cricket test. Which side do they cheer for? It's an interesting test. Are you still harking back to where you came from or where you are?" He was questioning the integration of fans who wanted England to lose and were explicitly cheering on the foreign opponents. I'm an Englishman; I want England to win. But I hear echoes of the Tebbit test when people ask me which team I will be supporting when we play in Tel Aviv tomorrow. They are making (albeit unconsciously) an interesting point. They are assuming that, as a Jew, I am somehow not as English as they are. While their loyalty to the team is implicit, mine is - for no other reason than my Jewishness - open to question.

Their assumption is based on the latest incarnation of the medieval trope of the Wandering Jew, renewed in the 20th century in Fritz Hippler's 1940 Nazi film, The Eternal Jew, and in Stalin's labelling of Jews as "rootless cosmopolitans". In such portrayals, Jews remain loyal only to themselves and their tribe, wherever they happen to live, and scheme to undermine the state to their own nefarious ends.

The creation of Israel in 1948 gave this an added twist. Jews are no longer just a rootless tribe conspiring for their own advantage, but are now also agents of a foreign power who use their overweening influence in politics, business and the media to align foreign policy in Israel's interests - perhaps you remember when the former US presidential candidate, Pat Buchanan, referred to Congress as "Israeli-occupied territory".

The same theme is regularly trotted out in regard to the Iraq war, as when, in 2003, the then Father of the House, Tam Dalyell, said that Tony Blair was "being unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish advisers". To paraphrase: if it hadn't been for those filthy yids, creeping under the carpet and exercising their devilish influence, all would be well.

A few months before Mr Dalyell opened his mouth, I had been told by a well-respected figure that "the Jews have taken over Middle East policy... The entire Iraq issue has been got up by the Jews... What else can we expect with a Jew [Lord Levy] as the real Foreign Secretary... The Jews have bought Bush, just as they buy every American President... Bush is too weak and stupid to stand up to the Jews."

Jews are not alone in standing accused of being outsiders whose loyalties are not merely split, but are actively devoted to pursuing a foreign power's agenda. When JFK stood for the presidency in 1960, his Roman Catholicism was presented as a barrier to his being a loyal president. Surely he would take instruction from the Vatican? He rebuffed the notion: "Whatever issue may come before me as President - on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject - I will make my decision in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise."

And many mainstream Muslims, who proudly see themselves as British, have no desire to establish the Caliphate and do not believe there is a contradiction between Islam and Western democracy, suffer a similar bigotry. Attaching such significance to frivolous jokes about split loyalties caused by a football match might seem over the top. But anti-Semitism is resurgent. The Community Security Trust, a Jewish body that works with the police to record anti-Semitic race hate incidents, has recorded a 31 per cent rise (from 455 to 594 incidents) between 2005 and 2006 - the highest since such reports began in 1984.

This week in France, more than 7,000 Jews have signed a petition to the US Congress asking for political asylum because of anti-Semitism in France. The petition reads: "Following the barbarous murder of a young Jew because he was Jewish, in the context of the rise in anti-Semitic acts committed by Islamic fundamentalists, numerous members of the community no longer feel safe in France... We believe that the United States, known for its traditional welcome to those under threat in their native lands, must open its doors to us".

The situation in Britain is not remotely as bad for Jews as it is in France. The notion of British Jews seeking asylum elsewhere is risible. But France should serve as a lesson that, even in the supposedly cultured world of 21st-century Europe, the oldest hatred still has murderous potency. And when you ask which team I want to win tomorrow, you are, even if in all innocence, proving my point.