Is European Anti-Semitism Really Back?

Bernard Wasserstein

June 11, 2015 

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/anti-semitism-back-13086?page=show

Anti-Semitic violence in Europe definitely remains a threat. But it is not new and it is not more virulent than in other countries.

A VIRULENT new wave of anti-Semitism is generally believed to be ...sweeping across Europe. European societies have allegedly become poisonously inhospitable to a Jewish presence. Israel, itself a prime target of the new anti-Semitism, is preparing for large-scale immigration of Jews from the Continent. Europe’s old Adam is supposedly reasserting itself.

Or is it? The common belief that anti-Semitism is making a comeback should be treated with caution, not least because efforts to exaggerate its reach and sway, often for self-serving political purposes, make it more difficult to discern when and where it truly poses a threat. A more judicious approach would start by recognizing that the term itself encompasses a multitude of sins that range all the way from off-color banter to mass murder. Should these be considered under the same rubric?

As an ideology, anti-Semitism morphed in the late nineteenth century from the anti-Judaism of the Christian church to a pagan, racist doctrine that was alloyed with extreme nationalism. Most problematically, there has been a marked tendency in recent years to conflate anti-Semitism with hostility to the Jewish state. Is denial of Israel’s right to exist as an independent Jewish state ipso facto anti-Semitic? Many Zionists and their supporters would say so—although those who oppose Scottish or Texan independence would not necessarily be tarred with a similar brush. But when it comes to anti-Semitism, the definitional nuances are often crushed under the juggernaut of automatic denunciation. Even three-quarters of a century after the shoah, such lack of differentiation is understandable. Unfortunately, it often leads to distorted conclusions.

A recent example came in January of this year with a flurry of newspaper headlines asserting, as the Guardian reported, “Nearly half of the British population agreed with one of four antisemitic statements presented to them according to a new poll.” The survey was commissioned by a hitherto little-known body, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, which warned that Britain was at a “tipping point.” But tipping toward what? Anti-Jewish legislation? Pogroms? Expulsion?

The group further claimed that 54 percent of Jews in Britain feared they had no future in the country, and a quarter had considered leaving in the previous two years. The methodology of the report was immediately criticized as shoddy and its conclusions as alarmist. Writing in Haaretz, the British-born commentator Anshel Pfeffer observed: “To compare today’s Britain, for all its faults, with the Jews’ situation in [the] 1930s exhibits a disconnect from reality which borders on hysteria.”

These rather excitable headlines appeared in the wake of a more sophisticated report issued in September 2014 by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in London. It came to different conclusions: “Levels of antisemitism in the UK are significantly lower than in other Western European countries, and . . . Jews in Britain feel noticeably less anxious about it than elsewhere on the continent.” An exception was noted in the case of Orthodox Jews, who expressed a much higher level of concern. That may be explained by the greater visibility of this group and its consequent sense of vulnerability. But in Britain and elsewhere, the Orthodox form only a small segment of the community, not representative, in this or in many other respects, of the whole.

Across continental Europe, Jews, it must be said, manifest a greater sense of insecurity—perhaps greater than at any point since the Second World War. An exhaustive study of Italian Jews’ “perceptions and experiences of antisemitism” was published this February, again by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. It found that six out of ten of those questioned considered anti-Semitism to be a big problem. A majority felt it had increased in Italy in the past five years. One in three had suffered some form of anti-Jewish harassment in the past twelve months (most of these incidents were not reported to the police). Although only 2 percent said they had experienced anti-Semitic violence, one-fifth of respondents worried about becoming a victim of physical attack in the future. One in four frequently avoided displaying Jewish signs or symbols due to concerns for safety. These findings are troubling in a country that, notwithstanding its interlude of fascist persecution, was historically a haven of relatively harmonious existence for Jews.

Another country with a small Jewish community where recent reports suggest a rise in anti-Semitism is Sweden. In Malmö, Sweden’s third-largest city, home to a large Muslim minority, the mayor, a Social Democrat and a non-Muslim, has accused the local Jewish community of courting hostility through its support for Israel. According to the online American Jewish magazine Tablet,“Wearing a yarmulke is no longer safe” in the city. In 2010, the Simon Wiesenthal Center issued what it called a “travel advisory” for Sweden, warning that “religious Jews and other members of the Jewish community there have been subject to anti-Semitic taunts and harassment.” Such fears are not restricted to Malmö. When I spent a year in Sweden in 2011–2012, local Jews repeatedly told me that they were confronted by a surge of anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli animosity.

The subjective feelings of victims of racial discrimination must be respected and should form part of our analysis. But they cannot be our only index of intercommunal attitudes and relations. According to the latest available official statistics (for 2013), out of 5,508 reported “hate crime” incidents in Sweden, only 4 percent were classified as anti-Semitic. Far more were motivated by other forms of prejudice, including crimes directed specifically against Africans, Roma, homosexuals, Muslims and Christians.

HOWEVER THE phenomenon may be defined, reported or measured, it is undeniable that across Europe there is much discussion, sometimes fevered, of a new and rising anti-Semitism. But how new is it? How dangerous? And how sweeping? Is it identical to anti-Zionism? Is it the main source of anti-Israeli feeling? Is the emerging multicultural Europe really incompatible with Jewish survival? Is a mass departure for Israel truly in the offing?

One useful vantage point for answering such questions is Istanbul, Europe’s largest city, and the one that, aside only from Rome, has probably been home to the oldest continuous Jewish settlement on the Continent. Its Jewish community was once the largest, wealthiest and most influential in Europe. But for several generations it has suffered demographic decline and gradual loss of cultural distinctiveness. This deterioration has accelerated in recent decades. Since 1948, its Jewish population has been reduced from fifty-five thousand to no more than fifteen thousand.

The other day, the following episode was related to me by a reliable source:

A friend recently went to a confectionery store in central Istanbul. At the till, a customer was collecting his money as his change was paid back to him. He rubbed the coins with his fingers and said something like: “Count carefully, count carefully, this is money and Jews care about money. Jews know everything about money.” This sounded anti-Semitic to my friend (who is not Jewish), and so he challenged the man as he went out of the shop. “But I am Jewish,” the man said. “I should know.” My friend fired a few questions at him about the Hahambaşı (the chief rabbi of Turkey) and received well-informed answers. It seemed he was indeed Jewish. Whereupon the shopkeeper, a man in his late thirties, chipped in, “That’s fine by me, I’m a deist. I was born a Muslim but I’ve given it up for just deism. I admire the Jews.” This led a bystander to ask curiously about the difference between deism and atheism, which had to be explained to him. “In the end,” the informant says, “we all agreed that we like the Jews and the deists and then I was free to carry on with my purchase.”

An apparently trivial everyday scene—but one in a city where, in November 2003, twenty-four people were killed and more than three hundred were injured in bombings of two synagogues. Against the background of fierce polemics in recent years between the Turkish and Israeli governments (particularly after the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010, when Israeli special forces killed ten Turkish citizens on a ship carrying relief supplies to Palestinians in Gaza), Istanbul’s Jews are understandably perturbed. Earlier this year, Israel’s deputy consul general, Ohad Avidan Kaynar, declared: “They have lived in a state of fear for a long time after terror attacks and the feeling that they are not treated as Turkish citizens. There is worry for the younger generation.”

So what more accurately represents the current position of Jews in Europe: The mildly benign attitude manifested in the candy store, or the view of a minority terrorized into emigration expressed by the Israeli diplomat?

Istanbul, of course, is only one of many cities in Europe where Jewish institutions and their occupants have suffered terrorist onslaughts: a Jewish school in Toulouse, the Jewish museum in Brussels and a kosher supermarket in Paris have all been scenes of carnage. In each case, four people were murdered. And this is to mention only the most prominent recent instances inside Europe.

That caveat should give us pause. In fact, attacks on Jewish targets outsideEurope have been more numerous and more murderous. One need mention only the bombing of the Jewish community building in Buenos Aires in 1994 that killed eighty-five people, the truck-bomb explosion outside the historic El Ghriba Synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia, in 2002, in which twenty-one were killed, and the coordinated attacks on Jewish and other targets in Casablanca in 2003 that left forty-five dead.

Europe, therefore, is not unique, and anti-Semitic violence there has, at least as measured by deaths and serious injuries, been on a lesser scale than on other continents. (The one significant outlier has been Turkey, where Islamist extremism has found fertile ground in recent years.)

NOR IS anti-Jewish violence of this kind in Europe particularly new. In fact, such attacks have been launched repeatedly, if sporadically, against Jewish and, even more, against Israeli targets since 1967. Again, the caveat is significant: Israeli embassies, diplomats, athletes, travel companies and airliners were targeted most frequently in the early years. As these strengthened their defenses, attention turned increasingly to the softer targets of Jewish institutions: prominent examples include the bombing of a synagogue on rue Copernic in Paris in 1980 (four dead); a gun-and-grenade attack in a Vienna synagogue in 1981 (two dead); an attack by terrorists armed with submachine guns in the main synagogue in Rome in 1982 (a two-year-old child killed); and an assault at a restaurant in the heart of central Paris in 1982 (six dead). The bloodiest of all was another Istanbul synagogue attack, in 1986, which left twenty-two dead.

In the great majority of cases so far mentioned, the originators of the attacks were identified and their motives ascertained (the most important exception is the Buenos Aires bombing, which is still the subject of judicial investigation and bitter political dispute in Argentina). At first the attackers were mainly members of Palestinian terrorist organizations. In more recent years, the sources have been more generally Middle Eastern and Islamist. The motives of the attackers similarly broadened from a narrowly anti-Zionist agenda to a more general hatred of the West. In Turkey in 2003, for example, shortly after the Istanbul synagogue bombings, a further thirty people were killed and hundreds more injured in assaults on the British consulate and HSBC bank’s Turkish headquarters. Like the synagogue attacks, these were laid at the door of a local affiliate of Al Qaeda.

Terrorist violence has been a staple in Europe and around the world, particularly since 9/11. But it is often pointed out that whereas the victims of many of these attacks, as in the case of the London bus bombings of 2005, have been random members of the general public, Jews have been specifically targeted again and again, as in the Paris Jewish supermarket attack earlier this year.

Again, the common wisdom is only a half-truth. Yes, Jews have been specifically targeted. But they are by no means the only group singled out among otherwise random victims of political violence in contemporary Europe. Nor are they the most frequent casualties. Many others find themselves objects of bloody hostility: in Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Italy and France, gypsies; in Germany and Bulgaria, Turks and those suspected of Turkish ancestry. The bitter ethnoreligious antagonisms among the peoples of the former Yugoslavia may have diminished since the end of the civil wars of the 1990s, but they have not disappeared. In Denmark and France, Islamist fanatics sought revenge against cartoonists deemed to have offended Islam. And in Norway in 2011, Anders Behring Breivik’s massacre of innocents was launched not at a random target but at a camp of young Norwegian socialists, whose party he held responsible for steering the country toward “multiculturalism.” Jews are certainly a stigmatized and targeted group, but it is incorrect to maintain that they are the only ones under attack.

AND, OF course, throughout Europe, hostility toward Muslims has grown inexorably in recent years, exacerbated by outrage at Islamist terrorism. It is curious that those who express the most concern about heightened anti-Semitism seem so often to wear blinkers when it comes to rampant anti-Islamism. The very people who complain that one cannot safely wear a yarmulke in public are frequently the ones who oppose the right of Muslim women to wear the burqa.

It is often maintained that a “new” (at least to Europe) form of anti-Semitism is what fuels anti-Israeli feeling. Islam, it is claimed, has been characterized since the days of the Prophet by deep hostility toward Jews. Such religiously sanctioned enmity lies at the root of Muslim support for the Palestinian cause against Israel and, it is further suggested, has fused in Europe with remnants of age-old Christian anti-Semitism to create a toxic brew of Jew-hatred.

Melanie Phillips, a popular right-wing British columnist, is a typical exponent of such views. Her books, articles, broadcasts and lectures over the past decade have depicted a Britain transformed into “Londonistan.” In a speech in 2005 to a conference on “terrorism and global antisemitism,” organized by the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, she warned that “the ‘oldest hatred’ has mutated from a desire to rid the world of the Jews into a desire to rid the world of the Jewish state.” Writing in the Wall Street Journal in 2009, she explained:

Britain’s elites are terrified of dealing with militant Islamism. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, in a pattern which goes back to the foundational Christian blood libel against the Jews, they are concealing their fearful inability to deal with Islamist aggression by displacing the blame onto its Israeli victims instead.

Such ideas are not original to Phillips. They have been accorded a tincture of academic respectability by studies that purport to show that anti-Semitism is deeply ingrained in Muslim thought, culture and society.

The works of the Egyptian-born writer “Bat Ye’or” (meaning “daughter of the Nile,” the pseudonym of Giselle Littman) fall into this category, with their recital of “thirteen centuries of sufferings and humiliations” visited upon Jews by Muslims, their Cassandra-like warnings of the threat posed by universal jihad, and their excoriation of European governments and societies for their failure to heed this danger. Many competent scholars, among them Mark R. Cohen and Bernard Lewis, have published correctives to this grossly distorted picture, and it is not my purpose to revisit that controversy here, but merely to note the undoubted influence of the works of Bat Ye’or and others like her.

BUT IS anti-Semitism really what lies at the root of the growth of anti-Israeli feeling in Europe in recent years? The reverse is much more plausible. Tony Klug, a British Jewish political commentator, recently wrote in a submission to a parliamentary committee of inquiry: “The basis of Palestinian opposition to Israel’s actions has little to do with it being a Jewish state. Had it been a Hindu or a Buddhist state, the Palestinians would have been no less embittered.” This is true so far as it goes, though one might add that the anti-Israeli cause has become a rallying cry for Islamists even more than the plight of Indian-occupied Kashmir or of the Muslim minority in Burma. Klug continues:

In essence, it now seems that it is the stance that groups and individuals take toward the Israeli state and the policies of its government of the day, that is becoming, bit by bit, the standard by which antisemitism is measured and assessed. . . . Contesting Zionism as a political ideology or questioning the legitimacy of a Jewish state [is] bound to make many supporters of Israel feel uncomfortable, even outraged. That’s understandable, but the critics are not necessarily driven by antisemitism. To corral them into this fold by slapping on the prefix “new”—as in “new antisemitism”—is not only simplistic and muddling, but it also risks trivializing past Jewish suffering, as well as genuine instances of antisemitism today. In general, it debases the “antisemitism” currency. 

Göran Rosenberg, perhaps the best-known Swedish Jewish journalist, shares Klug’s skeptical view. In an article in the Stockholm newspaper Expressen in August 2014, he wrote: “Jews have rarely lived in such security and freedom as they do today, neither have they enjoyed such public recognition and respect, and I must add, in the last two thousand years never had such power.” Dismissing the Wiesenthal Center’s “travel advisories” as absurd, he points a finger at what he sees as the chief source of the problem. “Fear-mongering among the Jews of Europe is now official Israeli policy,” Rosenberg told me, adding that “the present ambassador here, Isaac Bachman, is fanning the fire as much as he can.” Bachman had earlier objected when a Swedish radio interviewer asked him whether Jews themselves were responsible for anti-Semitism. The questioner eventually apologized, but Bachman’s reaction went well beyond the interviewer. In particular, he criticized the Swedish Lutheran church for disseminating “one-sided propaganda” against Israel and complained that it was circulating anti-Jewish stereotypes and denigrating the Jewish people and the Jewish faith. There have been similar complaints in Britain in recent years directed against, among others, the Church of Scotland, as well as against the media, in particular the Guardian and the BBC.

Yet the picture of a Europe under the thumb of anti-Semites and Islamist extremists is so detached from reality as to make one question the grip on rationality of those who peddle it. In fact, the overwhelming consensus of European opinion is hostile to such attitudes—including among most Muslims in the Continent, whose overwhelming desire is not for terror or a revived caliphate but for a quiet life.

It is instructive, in this regard, to compare the reactions to the rue Copernic synagogue attack in Paris thirty-five years ago with those to the killings earlier this year in the kosher supermarket in the same city. In 1980, the then prime minister, Raymond Barre, in what was widely interpreted as a revealing slip of the tongue, expressed his shock at “this attack which was intended to hit Jews attending a synagogue and which hit innocent French people crossing rue Copernic.” The logical—and immediately voiced—question was: So were the Jews not “innocents”? By contrast, Prime Minister Manuel Valls, in what the Anti-Defamation League called “a moment of true political greatness,” issued an unequivocal condemnation of this year’s Paris atrocities, insisting that Jews were an inseparable part of the French nation. With other French and foreign leaders, he led a march in favor of free speech and racial tolerance. It was the largest demonstration ever held in postwar France.

Notably absent were leaders of the far-right National Front. Yet even much of the formerly anti-Semitic Right now finds Muslims and immigrants in general a more convenient object of opprobrium than Jews (not that we should regard this as a cause for comfort). A revealing episode was the recent altercation between the founder of the National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and his successor as leader of the party, his daughter Marine. Following a television interview in which Le Pen père repeated a much-criticized earlier description of Hitler’s gas chambers as a mere “detail of history,” his daughter repudiated his comments and sought to ostracize him from the party.

The far-right magazine Rivarol, superficially a more intellectually respectable version of Charlie Hebdo, hailed Jean-Marie Le Pen as “the last free man” among French politicians. Yet it felt constrained to add that “the word ‘detail’ is undoubtedly not the most appropriate since, however one understands it, the question of the gas chambers is far from being a detail.” In noting mainstream politicians’ denunciations of Le Pen’s outburst, Rivarol remarked that they constituted “proof that the religion of the Shoah is one of the essential foundations of the present regime.”

Rivarol speaks, on most issues, for no significant body of opinion in France today—not even, it appears, the National Front. Yet on this point it uttered not so much a heresy as a truism. From a very different place on the political spectrum, the late Tony Judt argued in 2005 that “Holocaust recognition is our contemporary European entry ticket.” Anti-Semitic violence in recent years has been accompanied by (and perhaps has itself helped engender) a decrease in its public acceptability and legitimation by mainstream society.

Even a nasty anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim movement like Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, far from celebrating anti-Jewish or anti-Israeli themes, takes the trouble to emphasize support for the Jewish state—though Wilders forfeited whatever limited Jewish backing he might thereby have earned through his support for a parliamentary measure banning Muslim (and incidentally Jewish) ritual slaughter of animals. In speaking of “our Judeo-Christian civilization,” Wilders is much more representative of the new European extreme Right than Rivarol, which talks of “the survival of Western civilization and of its Greco-Christian roots.” Some far-right parties have even courted Jewish support: the Flemish Vlaams Blok, for example, has made some inroads among ultra-Orthodox Jews in Antwerp who feel threatened by Muslim immigrants.

Visitors to synagogues or other Jewish buildings in Europe are often struck by the highly visible defenses around them. Jewish schools in Berlin, for example, are surrounded by high walls and guards armed with submachine guns. Such sights, dare one say it, inevitably bring to mind an earlier era in which Jews were forced to live behind barbed wire. Yet the difference is vital: then the fences and guards were a sign of society’s collective assault on Jews; today they are an indication of society’s concern to defend them. Jews are not, in reality, the only group that requires such measures. But for better or worse, European states have determined that, given recent history, they are the group in whose defense society has the highest stake.

From an American point of view, it is worth bearing in mind that the European Union is by and large an area of civil peace, not only in the sense that no member state has ever gone to war with another but also in that the general level of violence is minimal, by world standards: the homicide rate is less than a quarter of that of the United States. One might add that the number of persons judicially deprived of life in the EU is zero. More people are probably killed in homicides in Chicago in a single year than have died in terrorist attacks in the whole of the European Union over the past decade. (I say “probably” because the problem of defining “terrorist violence” is, for statistical purposes, almost insuperable: for a discussion of this problem as well as detailed and impartial statistics, see the admirable website of the Global Terrorism Database.)

WHAT OF Jewish emigration from Europe to Israel? Even so normally levelheaded a commentator as David Brooks, writing in the New York Times in March, has announced that “thousands of Jews a year are just fleeing Europe.” The British home secretary, Theresa May, said after the recent Paris attacks, “I never thought I would see the day when members of the Jewish community would say they do not feel safe in this country.” In January, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called on French Jews to “come home” to Israel in the wake of the Paris attacks. A certain schadenfreude in some sections of the Israeli press accompanied reports of “the largest single-year movement of French Jews to Israel since the founding of the state.”

A closer look at the figures should give some pause to alarmist predictions. Almost seven thousand Jews moved to Israel from France in 2014. This is indeed the highest such number on record. But that rate would have to be maintained for something like half a century for the bulk of French Jewry to migrate. The crude figure is, in any case, misleading. Some of the migrants were sojourners in France who originated in North Africa. Moreover, the gross figure fails to take account of return migration, which, in the case of France, as in most Western countries, is high. Reliable estimates have it that as many as 40 percent of immigrants to Israel from Western Europe and North America eventually return to their countries of origin. And evidence suggests that the main variable in migration between Europe and Israel is not fear of anti-Semitism but economic opportunity. French stagnation since 2008 has rendered the relatively buoyant Israeli economy more attractive to newcomers.

The chief threat to the future of Jewish communities in Europe today is not emigration to Israel, which, since the end of the mass exodus of Jews from the former Soviet Union around 1996, has had only minor demographic effects. The past two decades have seen the lowest net migration rates to Israel in the country’s history. Indeed, a countercurrent of emigration of Israelis, including native-born Israelis, to Europe has to some degree bolstered Jewish populations there. In recent years the consulates in Israel of member states of the European Union have been besieged by Israelis of European ancestry who seek EU passports. Some, no doubt, view such documents merely as a potential safety net. But many would like to work and live in Europe, whether for a few years or permanently. The effects are visible in the significant Israeli immigrant populations in cities such as Berlin and Amsterdam.

Overall, the Jewish population of Europe is indeed falling. According to the Pew Research Center, it stands at 1.4 million today (compared with roughly four million in 1945 and ten million in 1939). Of these, a million or so live in Western Europe; the old Jewish heartland of Eastern and Central Europe is now nearly empty. The main cause of the continuing decline in the European Jewish population, however, is neither anti-Semitism nor (in the past two decades) emigration, but rather the extraordinarily low birthrate of Jews in Europe—as in all countries of the Diaspora. That rate is below replacement level almost everywhere. The reasons for this may be debated, but it is doubtful that anti-Semitism is one of them to any significant degree.

In a continent where Jews constitute less than 0.2 percent of the population, a majority of ordinary Europeans, outside of a few big cities such as London and Paris, have probably never consciously encountered a Jew. In Amsterdam, where I live, I have twice recently been asked, with curiosity and not a trace of animosity, “Do you belong to the ‘Old People’?” The average European, if there is such a person, probably has no strong feelings about Jews one way or another—rather like those people in the Istanbul sweetshop. Anti-Semitism is not an issue in the forefront of their thoughts most of the time. Nor is it an ideology that lies at the base of most of their political thinking. To conclude otherwise is to succumb to scaremongering that replaces rational analysis.

A FEELING of vulnerability has certainly mounted among European Jews in recent times. Anti-Semitic violence definitely remains a threat. But it is not new and it is not more virulent than in other continents. It is part of a general pattern of heightened racial and other antipathies in Europe, of which Jews are not the only or the most numerous victims. Anti-Jewish feeling in Europe today is, for the most part, not the lineal descendant of the racial anti-Semitism of the early twentieth century. Rather, it is closely tied to, and in large measure a product of, hostility to Israel, most keenly felt among sections of Europe’s growing Muslim populations. Far from forming part of the common currency of a European consensus, anti-Semitism today is outside the bounds of political and social respectability—probably more so than ever before. It is most unlikely to lead to significant emigration of Jews from Western Europe to Israel.

It would therefore be a grave mistake to exaggerate the scale, significance or likely consequences of anti-Semitism in Europe today. It is a problem. But it is not a crisis.

Bernard Wasserstein is an emeritus professor of modern European Jewish history at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is The Ambiguity of Virtue: Gertrude van Tijn and the Fate of the Dutch Jews (Harvard University Press, 2014).