Anti-Semitism is an existential threat to the Jewish community in Europe and the fundamental aims of the European Union, Michael O’Flaherty, the director of the bloc’s agency for fundamental rights, has said, according to The Guardian.
Michael O’Flaherty believes the problem is that only a third of the population considers anti-Semitism a serious problem, while undoubtedly “dramatic moments in our society provoke anti-Semitic reactions.” He told the Guardian:
It happened with Covid, it’s happening now with the Russian aggression [in Ukraine] – and now it’s happening again. Media and civil society organisations warn of a rise of antisemitism as the crisis in the Middle East unfolds. I honestly think that with any big negative issue in our society, you’re going to find antisemitic tropes finding their way in there. It’s indicative of the extent … antisemitism is a deeply ingrained racism in European society.
O’Flaherty believes that “it is also important now to be vigilant and condemn all forms of hatred that are being displayed in Europe, including hatred against Muslims.”
The war between Israel and Hamas has provoked an unprecedented rise in anti-Semitic incidents. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) there is a 300 per cent increase in anti-Semitic incidents in Austria. In the UK, police reported that 218 anti-Semitic hate crimes were reported between 1 and 18 October, more than 13 times higher than the same period last year.
In Germany, the anti-Semitism monitoring organisation RIAS has reported a 240% surge in anti-Semitic incidents since 7 October, which the anti-Semitism commissioner said could take the country back to “the worst of times”.
Many hate crime experts point to deep-seated negative perceptions of Jews, which, while always present, resurface in times of public stress. According to AFR research, a growing number of Jews want to leave Europe because of prejudice and discrimination. O’ Flaherty, previously a professor of human rights law at the National University of Ireland, said:
It is an existential issue in the sense that when we asked Jews whether they would consider leaving Europe, a significant number said they would … And more worrying still, when you look at who are those Jews, they are mainly young. We built the modern Europe on the basis of the repudiation of the horrors of the second world war, and uppermost of those horrors is and was the Holocaust – the genocide perpetrated against Jews … That’s why the persistent assault on this relatively small community of people is of such fundamental importance for Europe and for the values that we claim to uphold.
Experts believe that the problem of emigration and shrinking Jewish populations in most European countries is complex. In Britain and Austria, as in most other countries, Jewish communities are growing, albeit gradually, as immigration compensates for mortality among the often elderly population. In other countries, such as Germany, the size of the Jewish population is not changing significantly. However, many small communities have never recovered from the effects of the Holocaust, and further decline in the size of Jewish communities in Europe seems inevitable.
In most cases, emigration by European Jews is influenced by the same factors that motivate members of any other community to move: people move in search of stability, security and prosperity.
Violent attacks directed against Jews or motivated by ideology with strong anti-Semitic elements can be linked to increased Jewish emigration, for example from France in 2015-2016, when the country was rocked by a series of terrorist attacks, including several against Jewish sites.
Jonathan Boyd, the executive director of the JPR in London, told the Guardian in September:
Many European countries where there were once really big vibrant Jewish communities now have tiny Jewish populations – often just a few thousand – which are ageing and really struggling to maintain themselves … When you have antisemitism on top of that, it obviously doesn’t help. When people are very worried by that – particularly when it becomes murderous – the fears become acute enough to push some at least to leave.
