To say antisemitism is on the rise in Europe is commonplace. A dismayingly high percentage of Europeans (often in the 40s, according to surveys) believe Jews are too powerful in their countries’ governments, too influential in their media, and probably more loyal to Israel than to the countries in which they live. Physical assaults on Jews for their Jewishness—what are now called “hate crimes”—have become distressingly common in Europe.
The frightening thing about European antisemitism, though, as recent events have made clear, is that the ancient bigotry now issues from disparate social echelons.
In the United Kingdom, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is under fire—again—for his own and his Labour associates’ flirtations with antisemitism. He and other Labour members were part of closed member-only Facebook groups that trafficked in vile anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. The posts in Corbyn’s groups reportedly included images of Jews harvesting body parts—the age-old blood libel—and featured cartoons of the Rothschilds in control of the United States, Israel, Al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram.
These posts, until Corbyn’s public outing as a group-member, apparently weren’t sufficient reason for him to remove himself from the group. To be sure, the Labour leader says he didn’t see the posts, of which there are hundreds if not thousands. That’s possible. But we find ourselves asking: Why was the leader of the loyal opposition a member of such groups in the first place? Corbyn’s claim of ignorance would perhaps be more convincing had he not publicly counted among his “friends” (his words, not ours) the anti-Jewish terror groups Hezbollah and Hamas.
Anti-Jewish violence from radical Middle Eastern and North African immigrants continues apace. Last week, Mireille Knoll, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, was hacked to death and burned in her home, evidently by a young male Muslim neighbor. Emmanuel Macron said of Knoll that she was murdered “because she was Jewish,” and the facts of the case leave few if any alternative interpretations. Exactly a year ago, a 65-year-old French Jew, Sarah Halimi, was murdered by Kobili Traore, who reportedly shouted “allahu akbar” as he did the deed. (Sarah Halimi is believed to be a distant relative of Ilan Halimi, the French-born Jew kidnapped and murdered in 2006 by a gang of young Muslim radicals.) Before that, there was the murder of four Jewish hostages in one of Paris’s kosher food supermarkets two days after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Across the border in Germany, police recorded 1,453 antisemitic incidents in 2017, the great majority of them committed by Middle Eastern and North African immigrants.
Elsewhere in Europe, populist movements court the old prejudice. In Poland, a new law makes it illegal to suggest publicly that “the Polish Nation” was in any way complicit in Nazi crimes: this although Polish Jews were rounded up and sent to death camps in the 1930s with the help of a sizeable number of Polish elites. In Hungary, prime minister Victor Orban, who has up to this point generally avoided anti-Jewish rhetoric, last month gave a speech in which, in addition to deriding today’s most famous Hungarian Jew, George Soros, blamed a certain stateless enemy for Hungary’s problems: “We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world.”
If today’s European antisemitism were a more easily classifiable phenomenon—if it were associated mainly with left-wing politicos, or with Muslim immigrants and their children, or with right-wing reactionaries—we might dismiss it as an ugly but fleeting trend. The evidence suggests, alas, that it’s not a fleeting trend but an atavistic one.
