Anti-Semitism and Religious Liberty in Contemporary Europe

By David G. Dalin

In the two decades immediately following the end of World War II and the Holocaust in 1945, anti-Semitism was widely believed to have been on the sharp decline in Western Europe and England. The end of the Holocaust, it was assumed, made Jew-hatred, once endemic to Europe, now taboo in the very countries where anti-Semitism had once been strongest. This assumption, of course, turned out to be tragically incorrect. There has been a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe, that fifty years ago would never have been predicted.

    Much (but not all) of contemporary anti-Semitism in Europe has been the product of the Islamization of Western Europe, and the growth of Muslim-based Jew-hatred in countries such as France, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden and England.  In 1945, there were fewer than one million Muslims living in Europe. Between 2000 and 2018, Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, now numbering more than sixteen million in Western Europe and England, have taken the lead in inciting and perpetrating most (but not all) of the physical violence against European Jews. Many political observers and commentators have noted that there has been a “New Anti-Semitism,” and a new era of anti-Semitic violence in contemporary Europe. But as Jeffrey Goldberg, in his much-discussed April 2015 Atlantic Magazine article “Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe,” has pointed out: “What makes this new era of anti-Semitic violence in Europe different from the previous ones is that traditional Western patterns of anti-Semitic thought have now merged with a potent strain of Muslim Judeophobia. According to those who track it, most of the anti-Semitic violence in France, the epicenter of Europe’s Jewish crisis, appears to come from Muslims, who outnumber Jews 10 to 1.”  France’s 475,000 Jews represent less than 1 percent of France’s population. Yet, a 2014 survey by the European Jewish Congress found that France had more violent anti-Semitic incidents in 2013 than any other country in the world.

    Jeffrey Goldberg documents the fact that tens of thousands of European Jews are now planning to leave Europe, a trend that has continued and increased since the publication of his article. This is especially so in France, where over the past four years the pace of anti-Semitic violence and Jewish emigration from France has been accelerating. From being the largest Jewish community in Europe at the beginning of this decade, with a population of about 500,000, it is expected that it will fall to 400,000 or less within a few years, with tens of thousands of more Jews leaving France each year for Israel or the United States. In 2015, Natan Sharansky, Chairman of Israel’s Jewish Agency, reported that 50,000 French Jews had already inquired with his organization about immigrating to Israel the previous year. France’s Chief Rabbi, Haim Korsea, recently confirmed that the rising anti-Semitism has been causing a historically unprecedented exodus of large numbers of French Jews.

    In France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and England, the public display of the traditional Jewish head covering, known by most Jews today as a yarmulke or kippah, and other Jewish religious symbols, has more than occasionally resulted in violence against Jews.  Reports abound in recent years of French Jews being advised not to wear a Kippah in public because doing so might make them target for violent attacks from Muslims.  The vast majority of these attacks were not random but directed at conspicuously religious Jews wearing Kippot in public, often on the way to or from religious worship services at their synagogues. As a result, European Jews have become afraid to wear symbols of their religious faith, such as the Kippah, in public. This fear has become especially prominent amongst the Jews of France. A recent poll found that 74 percent of French Jews who wore traditional skullcaps in public reported being targeted for attack. In Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and London, there have been increasing incidents of Jews, wearing their Kippot, being attacked walking to or from synagogue. In 2012, the Israeli ambassador to Denmark, Arthur Avnon, advised visiting Israelis in Copenhagen against obvious displays of their religion, such as wearing their Kippot or speaking Hebrew in public. In Berlin and Copenhagen, as well as in the Swedish town of Malmo, Jews wearing a Star of David necklace in public have been targeted for attack. But it has not been only Muslims whose anti-Semitism has threatened the religious liberty and religious practice of European Jews. Laws or parliamentary resolutions prohibiting or infringing on Jewish religious practices have also surfaced throughout Western Europe. In both Germany and Britain, in recent years, political activists on the secular Left have publicly advocated outlawing Jewish ritual circumcision, the traditional Brit Milah,  that is a central tenet of Jewish religious faith and practice. Two-fifths of Britons and up to three-quarters of Germans now oppose Jewish ritual circumcision.  In Great Britain, also, there has been growing publicly-voiced opposition, including by secular left members of the Labour Party in Parliament, to Jewish ritual circumcision and the public display of Jewish religious symbols, such as the kippah. In response, there has been a growing recognition within the British Jewish community that such opposition to Jewish ritual circumcision and to the religious obligation of individual Jews to wear a kippah in public, infringes upon the free exercise of religion cherished by all British Jews.                                                                                                
    Kosher ritual slaughtering, another tenant of Jewish religious practice, is likewise under threat in Western Europe. In 2014, Denmark’s parliament passed a blatantly anti-Jewish law banning shechitah (Kosher ritual animal slaughtering) and banning Kosher butchers. Almost three-quarters of French men and women and almost one-half of Britons advocate a complete ban on Shechitah as well. In 2013, Francois Fillon, the Prime Minister of France urged French Jews to renounce “ancestral traditions with not much meaning nowadays,” such as Kosher slaughtering. These and other threats to the religious liberty of French Jews have increased in number.

    Since the second Palestinian uprising or Intifada against Israel beginning in 2000, and the growing Islamization of Europe during the past two decades, much of the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Western Europe and England has been inextricably related to radical Islamist hatred of Israel, to the rapidly growing (and radicalized) Muslim population in Western European countries, and to the growing support for the Palestinian cause amongst much of Western Europe and England’s political left.                               

    The situation for the Jews of France, England, and Western Europe deteriorated further in 2002, in response to a new Palestinian campaign of terror against Israel which caused an escalation in anti-Israel demonstrations and anti-Jewish violence throughout Europe.  In Belgium, firebombs were thrown into a synagogue in Brussels, and arsonists almost destroyed a Jewish bookstore. In Antwerp, a synagogue was firebombed with Molotov cocktails, and a travel agency specializing in trips to Israel was set afire.                   In 2002, as in the following sixteen years, France led Europe in anti-Jewish violence. Buses carrying Jewish schoolchildren were stoned.  Jewish cemeteries were desecrated. Synagogues, Jewish schools, and kosher markets were defaced and firebombed. The Or Aviv synagogue in Marseille was burned to the ground, its prayer books and Torah scrolls destroyed by fire.  Over the next decade and more, French Jews became ever more fearful for their safety, security, and religious freedom, as anti-Semitic violence, including a 2012 attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse, in which four people were murdered at point blank range by a French-born jihadist trained in the Middle East,  and the shooting of four Jewish visitors at the Jewish Museum of Belgium by a French Muslim man in May 2014, caused widespread fears and uneasiness throughout the French Jewish community.  The worst fears of France’s already tense Jewish community were realized on Friday, January 9, 2015, when a French Muslim gunman, who had sworn allegiance to ISIS, armed with a submachine gun and assault rifle, attacked a Kosher supermarket in east Paris, murdering four Jewish shoppers, and holding fifteen other Jews as hostages. This vicious attack, on the eve of the Jewish Sabbath, sent shockwaves throughout the Jewish community of France. As the hostage siege unfolded, police ordered the closure of all shops in the tourist-filled Jewish neighborhood in central Paris, far from the Kosher supermarket under siege in east Paris. Also, for the first time in recent French history, in advance of Sabbath worship services that Friday evening, the iconic Grand Synagogue of Paris was closed.

    The summer 2014 Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza precipitated an immediate spike in anti-Israel demonstrations and related violence against French, German, British, and other European Jews.  An especially distressing event relating to this conflict took place in Germany, where on January 13, 2017, a German regional court ruled that there was no anti-Semitism in an attempt by a group of Muslim men to burn down a synagogue in the German city of Wuppertal during the summer 2014 Israeli conflict with Hamas in Gaza. By this court ruling, the German legal system affirmed that German synagogues are legitimate targets for violent attacks by Muslims who are angry with Israel and that such attacks should not be considered anti-Semitic but understandable forms of political protest.

    While France has been at the forefront of Jew-hatred and anti-Semitic violence during the past sixteen years, England has not been far behind. Already, in 2002, the British columnist Petronella Wyatt observed with dismay: “Since September 11, anti-Semitism and its open expression have become respectable at London dinner tables.” Indeed, Wyatt recounts being told by a liberal Labour Party member in the House of Lords, “the Jews have been asking for it, and now, we can say openly what we think at last.” As the British Jewish journalist Melanie Phillips has persuasively argued, Great Britain – and especially London – has been a significant center of European anti-Semitism for more than two decades.  Since the 1960s, Jew-hatred has been fanned throughout the Islamic world and throughout Western Europe and England by the mass circulation of Arabic translations of notorious anti-Semitic publications, including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Hitler’s hate-filled and viciously anti-Semitic autobiography, Mein Kampf.  (It is interesting to note that there are now more Arabic editions of Mein Kampf  then German editions.) Although the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an infamous forgery dating from Czarist Russia that purported to document the existence of a secret Jewish conspiracy to rule the world has been discredited since the 1920s, it continues to be accepted as authoritative scholarship by the Muslim communities in London and Western Europe. Arabic editions of both The Protocols and Mein Kampf are always available on open display in bookstores in London’s Muslim neighborhoods, where they are featured and promoted along with books devoted to Holocaust denial and the vilification of Israel.

    In addition to the plethora of anti-Semitic publications available in British Muslim bookstores in recent years, there has been a rise in physical attacks on British Jews, attacks on synagogues and desecration of Jewish cemeteries. In 2004 alone, the Community Security Trust, a Jewish defense organization, recorded 532 anti-Semitic incidents in Great Britain. In his High Holiday message to British synagogues in 2005, then British Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks warned of a “new anti-Semitism” in England, and of “a tsunami of anti-Semitism” that was engulfing Europe. Rabbi Sacks’ prophetic warning has been reiterated more than once over the past decade.

    In country after country, in the past sixteen years, the European Left has been at the forefront of the resurgence of anti-Semitism, much of it related to the left’s hatred of Israel and passionate support of the Palestinians.  Indeed, sympathy for the Palestinians and opposition to Israel’s legitimacy and very existence as a nation-state has become a litmus test for many on the European left, a defining marker of what it means to be a progressive.   

    European anti-Semitism used to be a problem primarily of the political right. In recent years, however, throughout Western Europe and Great Britain, anti-Semitism has increased significantly amongst leaders of the political left, who have often enthusiastically joined forces with European Muslims in pro-Palestinian political activity, and in inciting and supporting hatred and violence against Europe’s Jews. In France, at pro-Palestinian rallies where chants of “death to the Jews” were heard, to cite but one example, the Muslim leadership of the rallies were joined by the leftist officials of various trade unions and members of the French Communist Party, the French Green Party, and the Revolutionary Communist League. 

The resurgence of anti-Semitism within the European political left has (in recent years) been most evident within the British Labour Party, which has now lost the support of a growing number of British Jewish voters. Under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, a virulently pro-Palestinian critic of Israel, who has praised the Palestinian Islamist terrorist organization Hamas, which governs Gaza, for its commitment to “peace social justice and political justice,” anti-Semitism has become more open in England. Anti-Zionism and virulent anti-Israel rhetoric usually bordering on the anti-Semitic have become a central tenet of Corbyn and his supporters’ left-wing politics. Under Corbyn’s leadership, Britain’s Labour Party has become the Party of left-wing anti-Semitism, while Corbyn himself has come under widespread criticism for his close association with left-wing supporters accused of Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism and terrorism. In response, during the 2015 national elections, a majority of British Jews for the first time voted for the Conservative Party.

    For many years prior to the Six Day War of June 1967, Labour had been Britain’s most pro-Zionist political party. This began to change when support for Palestinian statehood entered Labour Party policy in the early 1980s. When Corbyn was first elected to Parliament in 1983, he became a sponsor of the Labour Movement Campaign for Palestine, a new British group that was pledged to “eradicate Zionism,” and regarded Israel as a colonial project. Over the next three decades, Corbyn and his fellow left-wing leaders of Britain’s Labour Party labeled Zionism a racist ideology similar to apartheid. He also greeted visiting delegations from Hamas and Hezbollah as “our friends.”

    Anti-Semitism within the British Labour Party long preceded Jeremy Corbyn’s election to the Party leadership in 2015. In the wake of the Iraq War in 2003, when British Prime Minister Tony Blair publicly supported the Bush Administration, Tom Dalyell, a longtime left-wing Labour MP, publicly accused Prime Minister Blair of being “unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish advisers.” Ken Livingstone, a Labour Party MP and a notorious anti-Israel propagandist who has long espoused explicitly anti-Semitic views, served two controversial terms as Mayor of London from 2000 to 2008 and was subsequently expelled from the Labour Party in April 2016 for anti-Semitic comments – including praise for Hitler. More than twenty moderate Labour Party MPs had called for Livingstone’s expulsion, including John Mann, the heroic chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Anti-Semitism, who vilified Livingstone as a “disgusting Nazi apologist.”  With left-wing Labour Party anti-Semitism even further on the rise in 2018, and with the increasing prospect of a Labour Party victory in the next election and Jeremy Corbyn succeeding Theresa May as prime minister, more and more British Jews are beginning to think that the time to leave Britain is now.

    During the nineteenth century, most French and British anti-Semitism was a product of the political right. In late nineteenth century France, for example, the infamous Dreyfus Affair was instigated by ultra-conservative politicians and Christian clerics, while Dreyfus’s defenders and supporters, such as the liberal journalist Emile Zola, came from the political left. Also, the far right-wing Nazi puppet regime in Vichy France during World War II went far beyond what the Nazis demanded of them in terms of Jewish deportations to Nazi death camps, and willingly collaborated with the Nazis in the annihilation of tens of thousands of French Jews during the Holocaust. So too, in nineteenth-century England, it was the Conservative Party that for many years opposed Jewish political emancipation, the right for Jews to serve in Parliament and to pursue university studies at Oxford or Cambridge.  During the 1930s, it was Oswald Mosley’s far-right Union of British Fascists that incited anti-Semitic violence in the Jewish neighborhoods of London. Since 1945, however, British and French anti-Semitism (as anti-Semitism in several other Western European countries), has been much more prevalent and vocal on the political left.  This has been an important change in the source of contemporary European anti-Semitism that needs to be better remembered and understood.

Dr. David Dalin, currently a Senior Research Fellow at Brandeis University and a widely published scholar of American Jewish History, is the author, co-author or editor of twelve books. His much-acclaimed most recent book, Jewish Justices of the Supreme Court, from Brandeis to Kagan

Photographer: Kirill Makarov