European anti-Semitism stands exposed as a growing danger

WHEN is anti-Semitism not anti-Semitism? When it’s Jewish paranoia is one answer. When it’s criticism of Israel is another. The report of Britain’s all-party parliamentary inquiry into anti-Semitism, published last week, will be welcomed by many British Jews. The fact so high-level an inquiry was instituted in the first place confirms that the problem doesn’t exist only in their minds.

To call out anti-Semitism, unless blood has been spilled, is a hazardous enterprise in Britain. It draws the accusation of hyper­sensitivity. It attracts the opprobrium of other Jews who view themselves as less hysterical, and who consider it crying wolf or an attempt to silence fair criticism of Israel. And it plays to fears that lie buried deep in the British-Jewish psyche that to complain is to be ungrateful and, worse, that its only effect will be to call attention to a minority that has thrived by cultivating near-invisibility.

“Keep shtum” was my father’s advice to me when I was growing up in Manchester in the 1950s. Don’t go in fear, but don’t be too conspicuous either.

Yet among the inquiry’s findings is that hate crimes against Jews in Britain have doubled in the past decade. This confirms what some Jews fear and others have experienced, but that many will dismiss as insignificant. What constitutes a hate crime? Should we grant as much significance to a placard saying “Hitler was right” or “Death to Jews” as we do to a physical assault on a rabbi or a yeshiva boy? The abuse of Jews in social media may be on the increase, but so is abuse of everybody. Is the inquiry crying wolf on our behalf?

If I characterise this as a debate among Jews, it is also a debate individual Jews are having with themselves. Am I right to be worried? Should I be packing my bags to leave, or should I at least know where my bags are?

This is hardly Kristallnacht, says one voice. It was hardly Kristallnacht before it was Kristallnacht, says another. How many Berlin Jews saw the writing on the wall? Oh come on, London today is not the Berlin of the 1930s. No, but Berlin in the 20s wasn’t the Berlin of the 30s.

Of brute anti-Semitism — the going-in-fear-of-one’s-life variety — I have no personal experience. I have encountered defaced graves, brutal allusions, occasional instances of extreme face-to-face disparagement and even loathing. “Go and get a shower, you Jew,” a young middle-class woman said to me in the street a few years ago, “and you know what kind of shower I mean.” But who’s to say she wasn’t crazed? And you don’t pack your bags because you meet a single crazed person.

There are, however, other gauges of Jew-hatred beside physical violence, and it is right that the all-party inquiry has put its mind to those, contentious as some are.

Paramount among them is that indurated, unremitting hostility to Israel that tries to pass itself off as a disinterested critique of Zionism but whose slip, increasingly, is showing.

I mean those attacks on the legitimacy and founding principles of Israel; that rhetoric of blame that inculpates the Israeli government and army at every turn, now accusing them of massacre, now of genocide, comparing them to the Nazis and Gaza to the Warsaw ghetto; that assumption of wilful sadism, of wallowing in slaughter, no matter that there is no evidence to support the charge or a motive to explain it; and those sinister little acts of wondering — just wondering: it’s all right to wonder isn’t it? — whether, say, the Israel Defence Forces only went to help the relief effort in Haiti to traffic in the organs of the dead.

That implicit invocation, in other words, of the ancient figure of the Jew as malign being, pitiless adversary and, of course, child-killer.

That this is fair criticism, under no circumstances to be confused with anti-Semitism, is belied not only by the extremity of its language but by the ill will implicit in its system of comparison. Who that intends no harm to Jews would, for example, visit the spectre of Nazism on them, wounding them where they were most recently wounded? Who that means no harm to Jews would accuse them, through Israel, of not having profited ethically from the Holocaust, as though they were given an opportunity to learn ­humanity but, as Israel testifies, failed again.

Many of the commentators most carried away by the ­vehemence of their own revulsion last northern summer were shocked to see manifestations of anti-Semitism among those demonstrating on behalf of Gaza. This, they were quick to insist, was far from anything they had intended.

It is hard to decide whether they were being cynical or naive. Could they really have supposed there would be no spillage from their hyperbole? The past century teaches that extremity can pass from refined discourse to street barbarism in no time at all. And if the mob detects the sweet cordite-like smell of anti-Semitism in your prose, that’s because it’s there.

It was courageous of France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls to point to fanatic anti-Zionism with its panoply of bans and boycotts, distortions and defamations, as contributory, in its passing on of the bacilli of blame, to the lethal attacks on Jews in Paris last month.

Until recently anti-Zionism of any stripe has been a sacred cow. With the British inquiry coming to a similar conclusion as Valls, is it too sanguine to expect a lessening of the vocabulary of hatred, one consequence of which will be the opportunity genuinely to debate the rights and wrongs of ­Israel? Can the frightening nexus of classical European anti-Semitism and Muslim Jew-hating be dissolved at last by reason? Or must a Jew in Britain still keep shtum?

Howard Jacobson, a Man Booker Prize-winning novelist, is author most recently of J (Hogarth, 2014).