LIKE MOST American synagogues, the Kehilath Jeshurun congregation in Manhattan flaunts its Jewishness. The Hebrew letters of its name are cut in the stone façade, under stained-glass windows bearing six-pointed Stars of David. On the Sabbath, when Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump prayed there (before moving to the White House last year), they would walk past the local Jewish day-school through streets filled with Orthodox families. More progressive Jews might go to the even more ostentatious Park Avenue Synagogue, or one of New York’s hundreds of other temples.
In contrast, the Jewish Cultural Centre in Amsterdam is almost out of sight. No religious symbols or Hebrew script identify its exterior. Visitors must be buzzed by a receptionist into a vestibule through double doors. The city’s main Jewish day-school is equally nondescript, surrounded by fences and cameras. Security was tightened after a terrorist attack on a Jewish museum in Brussels in 2014. Some Jews who wear skullcaps no longer visit areas with large Muslim populations.
Such snapshots say much about Jewish life in the West: thriving and exuberant in America; nervous and under attack in western Europe. The new continent has been a promised land; the old one a museum or graveyard. Some American Jews have warned their European brethren to leave. Thousands have gone to Israel, notably from France, where, along with murders and other outrages, graveyards have been desecrated (pictured above).
Frightening times
Yet this oversimplifies matters. Most Jews in Europe do not cower. Nor have American Jews been as safe as they presumed. That became tragically apparent on October 27th, when a white-supremacist gunman, named as Robert Bowers, shot dead 11 Sabbath worshippers in Pittsburgh (see article). “I never thought that the kind of terrorism that we have seen in France and in other places in Europe would be raising its ugly head in America,” says Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish group. And he thinks “it’s only the opening round.” Suddenly, it is American Jews who have started talking about whether, when and how to leave.
It is futile to try to assess the true extent of Jew-hatred from the deeds of a lone gunman. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which fights bigotry, says there was a sharp rise last year in anti-Semitic incidents, such as vandalism of Jewish sites and harassment (including bomb threats). But the number of assaults on Jews was small and fell. Worldwide, violence against Jews has declined sharply since 2014, according to an annual study by Tel Aviv University’s Kantor Centre (see chart).
Beyond such violence, defining anti-Semitism is harder because it is so protean. Historically, notes Jonathan Sacks, Britain’s former chief rabbi, “Jews were hated because they were poor and because they were rich; because they were communists and because they were capitalists; because they kept to themselves and because they infiltrated everywhere; because they clung to ancient religious beliefs and because they were rootless cosmopolitans who believed nothing.” These days, overt Jew-hatred is comparatively rare in the West, largely because of its association with the Nazi Holocaust. Often it is disguised. Rants about “globalists” on the far-right and “Zionists” on the far-left can be euphemisms for “Jews”. Yet both words have straightforward meanings, too, and not all who use them are bigots.
Michal Bilewicz of the University of Warsaw outlines three categories of anti-Semitism. The “traditional” kind is based on Catholic teaching (since abandoned) that Jews killed Christ, and on medieval blood-libels (accusations that Jews killed children to mix their blood with Passover flatbread). The second, “modern”, sort is based on a belief in conspiracies by powerful Jews. The last kind, “secondary” anti-Semitism, holds that Jews abuse the history of the Holocaust. Others seek to categorise the miasma differently: eg, as racist, economic, cultural and religious; or explicit and coded; or soft and violent.
Many see a “new anti-Semitism” that developed after Israel’s victory in the six-day war of 1967. The Soviet Union and its vassals purged Jews on the grounds that they were Zionists and thus agents of America. This overlaps with Muslim Jew-hatred, which not only denounces Israel but also presents Jews as the enemies of Muslims since the time of the Prophet Muhammad. This form has proven the most murderous in recent decades. Global jihadists say they are fighting against “Jews and Crusaders”. In the West anti-Semitic acts by Muslim migrants tend to spike with rises in Israeli-Palestinian violence. Speaking at a protest against the war in Gaza in 2014, Appa, a Dutch-Moroccan rapper, blurred the line between politics and religion: “Fuck the Zionists! Fuck the Talmud!”
Left, right and wrong
A wave of jihadist attacks against Jewish targets in Europe in 2012-15 resulted in 13 deaths in France, Belgium and Denmark. Increased security, and caution by many about revealing their Jewish identity, led to a drop in attacks on Jews. Attention shifted to anti-Semitism on the radical left. Britain’s Labour Party, the main opposition and political home of many Jews, has torn itself apart this year over which kind of criticism of Israel should be regarded as an attack on Jews. Jeremy Corbyn, its left-wing leader, agreed only grudgingly to accept that utterances repudiating Israel’s right to exist, or accusing it of behaving like the Nazis, were anti-Semitic.
Yet it is odd that right-wing anti-Semitism, obsessed with Jews at home, and the left-wing variety, focused on Jews in Israel, survive at all. The number of Jews in the world is quite small—about 6m apiece in Israel and America, and another 2.5m scattered elsewhere. Indeed, some talk of “anti-Semitism without Jews”.
The Pittsburgh murders were a stark reminder of the threat lurking on the far right, particularly among white supremacists who lump Jews in with blacks, Muslims and other minorities as objects of hatred. American far-right groups benefit from a greater degree of free speech than do European ones—and easy access to guns.
Binding the disparate dislikes is a belief in conspiracies—that Jews control society, the economy, the media or the world. “Once you start down the path of interpreting the world in terms of conspiracies, sooner or later you stumble into anti-Semitism,” says Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust, a British charity that helps protect Jewish institutions.
Perhaps the most enduring fantasy, that Jews are plotting to dominate the world and destroy civilisation, was popularised by the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, a tsarist forgery from 1903. That trope has been turbo-charged by social media, which can turn rumours into accepted facts, and spread fringe ideas.
A study by the ADL of more than 4m anti-Semitic tweets last year found that a favourite theme is the demonisation of George Soros, a Hungarian-born Jewish financier and donor to liberal causes. This seems to have begun in Russia, home of the Protocols, and spread to Serbia, Macedonia, Turkey and his birthplace in Hungary. There, the populist government of Viktor Orban in 2017 plastered the financier’s face on posters with the slogan “Let’s not let Soros have the last laugh.” The hysteria reached Britain, where Mr Soros is vilified for his role in helping to push the pound out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992. One newspaper ran a sinister front page accusing him of “backing secret plot to thwart Brexit”.
Soon enough, anti-Soros vitriol was poured by right-wingers in America and by President Donald Trump himself. In Pittsburgh, some Jewish mourners say they are “pulsating with anger”—at Mr Trump even more than at the gunman. A defining moment, for many, came during clashes in Charlottesville last year between white nationalists, some of them chanting “Jews will not replace us!”, and counter-protesters. Mr Trump all but equated neo-Nazis with anti-racists by saying there were “very fine people on both sides”.
That was “a mistake”, says Rabbi Hier, who led a prayer at Mr Trump’s inauguration. The president divides families and Jewish congregations, admits the rabbi. “But it is hard to say he is anti-Jewish. Of all the presidents who promised to move the American embassy to West Jerusalem, he is the only one who has done it.”
Several populists in Europe have also sought to embrace Israel, whether to cleanse themselves from the stain of neo-Nazism or because they regard Israel as a strong ethno-nationalist state. In France Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front (now renamed National Rally), has moved to cleanse the party of the anti-Semitic image it had under her father, Jean-Marie. She has described the Holocaust as the “height of barbarity” and claims to be “the best shield” for Jews in France against “Islamic fundamentalism”. An ex-adviser even set up a group called the Union of French-Jewish Patriots. Yet her charm offensive has its limits. During the presidential campaign in 2017, she enraged French Jews by stating that “France was not responsible for the Vél’ d’Hiv”, the wartime roundup of French Jews and their deportation to the death camp at Auschwitz in 1942.
Israel, for its part, has been happy to repay populists’ love. When Hungarian Jews persuaded the Israeli ambassador in Budapest to denounce the anti-Soros posters as inherently anti-Semitic, he was countermanded by the Israeli government. The Israeli foreign ministry described Mr Soros as a figure who “continuously undermines Israel’s democratically elected governments”, and funds organisations “that defame the Jewish state and seek to deny it the right to defend itself”. Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, seems to see Mr Orban as a soulmate who can ease European pressure on Israel over its treatment of Palestinians. For Keith Kahn-Harris of Birkbeck College in London, Mr Netanyahu’s dalliance with populists “is splitting diaspora Jews from Israel”.
The rising climate of hatred alarms many Jews. For the most part, they have benefited from the liberal order which populists threaten to disrupt. Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University in Georgia, the author of a forthcoming book on anti-Semitism, argues that Jews in America have enjoyed a “golden age”.
Freed from restrictions on where they could live, study and work, Jews are well integrated among the elites of Western countries. But Jew-hatred, however latent, has never been wholly vanquished. And, as Rabbi Sacks argues, “anti-Semitism is the world’s most reliable early warning sign of a major threat to freedom, humanity and the dignity of difference.” It is sometimes said that violence against the Jews does not stop with the Jews. In Pittsburgh, the trail of bloodshed has run the other way. Murderous hatred, which had already killed black worshippers elsewhere, has now reached the Jews. Who will be next?