Medvedev claims to be Russian Orthodox and he refuses to discuss his ethnic routes but his mother's name is Shaposhnikova, well known Jewish name in Russia. This is not the first time racism of this type has been used with slurs against former President Yelzin also making much of his Jewish ancestory

Leaders of Russia's Jewish community say there are about one million Jews living in the country, a quarter of them in Moscow. They are no strangers to discrimination. Under empress Catherine the Great, Jews were confined to the Pale of Settlement in western Russia. In 19th century pogroms in such western provinces, Jews were beaten, raped and had their villages burnt down, forcing many to flee.

In the days of Communism, thousands of Jews had to conceal their identity and about one million fled to the West and Israel in the 1970s and 80s but after the collapse of the Soviet Union, much of the anti-Semitism focused on the "oligarchs" -- businessmen who made huge fortunes almost overnight from the privatisation of state property. Many of them are Jewish.

One far-right group, the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, has a forum on its Internet site where dozens of users debate Medvedev's roots, many using pejorative slang words for Jews. One viewer posted pictures of two Russian Jewish oligarchs, Roman Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky, asking surfers to compare facial features with Medvedev.

There were about 20 recorded attacks last year on Jewish people and property in Russia, according to the National Conference on Soviet Jewry (NCSJ), a U.S. non-governmental organisation. They included graffiti on Jewish gravestones saying "Holocaust 2007", a vandalised synagogue in the far eastern port of Vladivostok and an assault on a visiting rabbi from Canada.

But thousands of Jews who left the Soviet Union and moved to the West are coming back to Russia, many of them attracted by jobs and opportunities in the country's booming economy.