Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis says Charlie Hebdo 'God' cartoon is insulting to believers

He added that it was not uncommon for him to come across cartoons he found offensive, but that they were "most often images which invoke the Holocaust or Nazi imagery as a gratuitous way of berating the Jewish community of the state of Israel."

But he was comforted by the knowledge that most fair-minded people would condemn such images.

In the case of the Charlie Hebdo cartoon, he said, "I am left without such comfort".

He concluded that "free speech may be a right, but only by using it as a force for good, do we make it a virtue".

Earlier this week, the Vatican's newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, condemned the cartoon as "an authentic blasphemy".

But Laurent Sourisseau, Charlie Hebdo's head of publication, defended the illustration. He told CNN: "It is a caricature representing the symbolic figure of God.

"To us, it's the very idea of God that may have killed our friends a year ago."

Twelve people - 10 journalists and two policemen - were killed when two gunmen with ties to Daesh attacked the magazine's office in Paris in January 2015.

Four more people died when the Hyper Cache kosher supermarket was attacked two days later.