LONDON — Jewish people are four times more likely to be attacked in Britain because of their religion than Muslims, according to figures compiled by the police.

One in 400 Jews compared to one in 1,700 Muslims are likely to be victims of faith-hate attacks every year. The figure is based on data collected over three months in police areas accounting for half the Islamic and Jewish populations of England and Wales. The crimes range from assault and verbal abuse to criminal damage at places of worship.

Police forces started recording the religion of faith-hate crime victims only this year. They did so on the instruction of the Association of Chief Police Officers, which wanted a clear picture of alleged community tensions around the country, following reports of Muslims being attacked after September 11, 2001, and the July 7 London bombings last year.

However, the first findings, for July to September, obtained by the Sunday Telegraph under freedom of information legislation, show that it is Jews who are much more likely to be targeted because of their religion.

The figures also suggest that many faith-hate crimes remain unsolved, contrary to the picture painted by the Crown Prosecution Service in a report this month. The CPS said only 43 people were charged with “religiously aggravated” offenses last year, and it concluded that the large rise expected after the July 7 bombings had not materialized.

Police figures suggest, however, that hundreds of faith-hate crimes are being committed, with very few ever reaching court. Those figures include any crime that is reported to police that the victim believes is motivated by hatred of his or her religion.

The CPS report showed that not a single person accused of an anti-Semitic crime had been prosecuted on a charge of religiously aggravated offending. It said: “The police statistics include incidents where no defendant has been identified or where there is insufficient evidence for a prosecution.”

A report by members of Parliament in September said British Jews were more vulnerable to attack and abuse now than for a generation. The former Tory leader, Iain Duncan Smith, who sat on the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Anti-Semitism, said it was “perverse” that not all police forces recorded anti-Semitic incidents and that some forces “verge on the complacent.” The ACPO directive was ignored by most forces, whose systems are not designed to record religion, though they routinely record ethnicity. ACPO said large organizations take time to adjust to new systems.

The Sunday Telegraph has obtained information on faith-hate crimes from the Metropolitan Police, Greater Manchester, South Wales, and West Mercia forces. In London and Manchester, where Muslims outnumber Jews by four to one, anti-Semitic offenses exceeded anti-Muslim offenses, according to the figures, which do not record the faith of the offenders.

Rabbi Alex Chapper, 33, was the victim of a “faith-hate” crime in July last year. According to Rabbi Chapper’s account, he was returning from a synagogue in Ilford, East London, with three Jewish friends after conducting a service. All were wearing skullcaps. Seven Asian teenagers followed them down the road shouting “Yehudi,” which means Jew in Arabic. One of them shouted, “We are Pakistani, you are Jewish. We are going to kill you,” before punching Rabbi Chapper in the face and hitting one of his friends over the head with a bottle.

“It was very frightening, we were all very shaken,” Rabbi Chapper said. “I thought we were going to get seriously hurt, but someone threatened to call the police, and they ran off.

“We identified the youths and told the police, but they were never prosecuted. They just did not seem interested. I feel very let down.”

A spokesman for the Community Security Trust, which monitors attacks on Jews, said: “Many people hoped and believed anti-Semitism had burnt itself out. This is not the case.”