Police are treating the attack as attempted murder, they said, adding that the woman’s life was not in danger and no arrest had been made.

“This act could have anti-Semitism as its motive,” the prosecutors’ office in the southeastern city said late Saturday.

A police source told AFP that, according to the woman’s statement, she opened her door to a person who rang the doorbell and then stabbed her twice. Dressed in dark clothes and with their face partly concealed, the attacker then fled the scene.

A swastika — a symbol much used in Nazi Germany and by neo-Nazis —  was found scrawled on her door, the source said, but police had been unable to determine whether it had been put there ahead of the attack.

The regional branch of the CRIF, the representative council of Jewish institutions in France, quickly condemned the stabbing, saying it had “prompted great concern in the Jewish community”.

CRIF president Richard Zalmati also urged “caution”, saying it was up to the judiciary to determine whether there had been an anti-Semitic motive to the attack.

The victim’s lawyer, Stephane Drai, told the BFMTV broadcaster that her family’s Jewish faith was known in the neighbourhood.

Since an attack by Hamas against Israel on October 7 that left 1,400 dead, there have been 857 anti-Semitic acts in France, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said last week, and 425 people arrested.