Everyone gets bored of dressing up as Mordechai for Purim but one shul-goer may have taken things a little too far when he arrived for a megillah reading in Paris dressed as a jihadist and wielding a fake rifle.

It came as a shock to the soldiers guarding the synagogue, said a police source, when the man arrived wearing long robes and crying “Allahu akbar” at Chabad Lubavitch synagogue in Vincennes, south-east Paris, on Thursday night.

"It created a certain emotion among the soldiers," a source said.

The shock passed once other members recognised the man and realised it was a joke.

He was, however, asked to go to the local police station on Friday.

Synagogues and other Jewish establishments in France have been guarded by police or soldiers since the attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris in January 2015.