Prof. Judy Tydor Baumel-Schwartz, Director of the Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research at Bar-Ilan University
Antisemitism—the hatred of Jews—is not a new phenomenon in Europe or those states created by Christian European settlers, such as the United States.
Initially antisemitism was a religious phenomenon, with Christians falsely accusing Jews of being evil creatures in line with the devil, who spread plague and engaged in horrendous rituals that included murdering Christian children to use their blood in baking Passover matzah, the infamous blood libel.
Later, with the Enlightenment and the rise of secularism, antisemitism became racialized, with Jews held simultaneously to be an inferior “race”, harboring primitive beliefs that held the world back from its true, secular “salvation”, and of being hyper-intelligent manipulators of global events, spreading chaos in non-Jewish societies and being engaged in nefarious economic practices meant to take over the world.
This tendency of antisemitism to accuse Jews of contradictory “offenses” is constant: Jews were blamed for being behind Communism and capitalism; accused of being too particularist and too universalist; in short, of being the source of every evil that existed. Scapegoating Jews for all the world’s problems has continued into the modern era.
Throughout the ages, Jews were confined to ghettos, forced to wear special garb, hats, or signs on their clothing, were murdered in pogroms, and ultimately nearly exterminated when six million of them were slaughtered by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust (1933-1945).
For a number of years after the Holocaust, it was considered not “politically correct” to accuse Jews of all the world’s evils, at least in the West, but by the 1970s and 1980s that had changed. Led by the Soviet Union, antisemitism started to express itself as “anti-Zionism”. In more recent times, the older forms of antisemitism have returned, sometimes with a “modernized” spin, but in substance no different to the antisemitism that existed before the Second World War.
A few years ago, I corresponded with a young Jewish girlfriend who lives in a Paris suburb. “You won’t believe what I am seeing from my window”, she wrote to me. “There is a mob of people turning over trash cans, defacing bus stations, and taking apart everything in their way. And guess what? For a change it isn’t because they are blaming the Jews for something!”
At first glance it would seem that she was joking about the state of demonstrations in France, but she was actually writing this in all seriousness. During the second decade of the twenty-first century, the Jews of France, along with the Jews of most of Europe, had become accustomed to demonstrations against them. A good deal of these demonstrations were nominally focused against “Zionists”, but in other cases, the anger of the demonstrators and those destroying property, was focused upon Jews everywhere. These contemporary antisemites did not stop at demonstrations, holding up signs with antisemitic slogans, or writing ugly graffiti against the Jews on the walls of buildings and train or bus stations.
Some of these incidents ended in murder. In 2012, a teacher and three pupils were murdered at a Jewish school in Toulouse by a jihadist. In 2016, Jews were injured during attacks in Marseilles and Strasbourg. In 2017, a Jewish woman was thrown to her death from a balcony in Paris. And in 2018, an elderly Jewish woman, a Holocaust survivor, was murdered in Paris in what the police described as a “hate crime”. In total in 2019, there were 687 antisemitic actions and threats recorded in France, 339 in 2020, and 589 in 2021.
The situation in other countries is no better. In Austria, there were 30 antisemitic incidents motivated by far-Right extremism in 2019, 36 in 2020, and 53 in 2021. In Belgium there were 14 cases of Holocaust denial and revisionism recorded by police in 2019 and 70 cases of antisemitism; 27 cases of denial and 115 cases of antisemitism in 2020; and 11 cases of denial and 81 of antisemitism in 2021. In Denmark, there were 51 extremist crimes targeting Jews in 2019, 79 in 2020, and 94 in 2021. The list goes on and on.
In Switzerland, Jews were threatened by knife wielding assailants, in Britain there are some 100 antisemitic incidents a month, including the defacement of Jewish tombstones, vandalism of Jewish property, drawing swastikas on Jewish stores, and, of course, physical attacks on Jewish men, women, and children. A 2019 study in Italy stated that one of every five Italians has antisemitic views. In Poland and Hungary, Jews are able to walk through the streets wearing Jewish symbols with less fear of being attacked, but these countries are the exceptions to the rule.
This fact pattern occurs beyond Europe. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which tabulates antisemitic incidents throughout the United States, in 2021 there were 2,717 antisemitic incidents in the USA, a 34% increase from the 2,026 incidents of 2020. These involved mostly vandalism and assault, but unlike previous years there were no cases that ended in death. Many of the incidents were those of far-Right extremist groups and white supremacists, some mentioning “Zionism” but many overtly focusing on Jews.
Seventy-eight years after the liberation of Auschwitz on 27 January 1945, a date which later became International Holocaust Memorial Day worldwide, antisemitism not only persists but is once again reaching a level reminiscent of the years prior to the Second World War. When speaking to elderly men and women, those in their late 80s, they are the first to state how reminiscent this is of their childhood and how the period after the war where antisemitic attacks were few and far between was an anomaly that is now over.
Who stands behind these attacks and what can we learn from it? Mostly radical groups, generally far-Right and Islamist, but others, too. The attackers are old and young, rich and poor, atheists and believers. Jews are blamed for racism, nationalism, attempts to control the world economy, and trying to drive the West into another world war. The Jewish religion is presented as a monstrous construct, and Holocaust denial and revisionism are once again becoming commonplace. It is as if the world has forgotten the lessons of the Holocaust and what hate can do. As has often been said, “It only starts with the Jews”. Once such baseless but rabid hatred begins towards the Jews, it can and will spill over to many other victims.
It is therefore up to every thinking and caring person to be on the alert to help prevent and stop this very dangerous phenomenon.
European Eye on Radicalization aims to publish a diversity of perspectives and as such does not endorse the opinions expressed by contributors. The views expressed in this article represent the author alone.
