Global anti-Semitism is having a rebirth. But did it ever die?

Hundreds of people participate in the March of Solidarity with Palestine in the center of Warsaw, Poland.

Just after the British police announced a 1300 per cent rise in antisemitic hate crime due to the atrocities of October 7, there was a march for Palestine in London. There were signs that read: The Zionist lies more than it breathes. The irony of becoming what you hated. There is blood on your hands. (The “a” is replaced by a Star of David). Keep the world clean. (An image of a stick-man throwing a Star of David in a bin, a pastiche of an anti-littering advert, is next to it.) On the London Underground a train driver led a chant of “Free Palestine” from his cab. At a rally the week before, an Iranian man with an Israeli flag was chased down an alley off Whitehall and had to be protected by police. Photographs of Israeli hostages have been torn down all over London, usually by young women. They chant “From the river to the sea”: a call for Jewish annihilation, though they do not always acknowledge it. The marches intensified throughout October across the world. Social media is a maelstrom of Jew hate. Jewish sites are defaced with graffiti or picketed by people denouncing Jewish violence, or existence. There was a would-be pogrom in southern ­Russia, only thwarted because the pogromists could find no Jews. They looked.

People take part in a March For Palestine in London. Picture: AFP

The British Jewish community of 270,000 has responded in many ways, some of which overlap: silence; contrition; rage; fear; defiance. But this isn’t a piece about Jews. It’s about non-Jews and what they do, or don’t do.

Three synagogues were attacked that week: in Spain, Tunisia, and Berlin. (The one in Tunisia is unused. The community has long since fled. The mob burned it down anyway because antisemitism, as Sartre said, is a passion, and a passion makes no sense). In Barcelona, a Jewish hotel was surrounded and Palestinian flags erected on its balconies. In Germany Jewish stars were painted on Jewish houses. In France, the front door of a Jewish house was set alight. A march in Poland, the site of the Holocaust, had a copy of the Star of David as a litter placard. (The Nazis used cyanide-based pesticide to kill Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau: the sign is more apt here). In 1940 there were 3,500,000 in Poland. Now there are 5000: too many still, it seems.

What has happened? How, after the Holocaust, which eradicated two-thirds of Europe’s Jews, can a call for a further eradication be ­accepted – even tolerated? To paraphrase Woody Allen’s Hannah and her Sisters: It’s the wrong question. The right question is, why didn’t it happen before?

Any analysis of the anti-Semitism brewing in Europe now must begin with the Gospels, which charge Jews with the rejection, and murder, of Christ. “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do”. (John). “When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.” “So, when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves’.” (Matthew). “And all the people answered, ‘His blood be on us and on our children!’” These are the foundation documents of anti-Semitism: they establish the demonic ­quality of the Jew in antisemitic discourse, and his power. If you can kill a god, what can’t you do? What won’t you do?

Medieval Christian Europe used its Jews as sin eaters: one society projecting its evils onto the other. Vasily Grossman put it best in his novel Life and Fate (1959): “It is a mirror for the failings of individuals, social structures, and state systems. Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, I’ll tell you what you are guilty of.” It is “a measure of the contradictions yet to be ­resolved”. When societies were excitable or ­unstable – during the crusades, the Black Death – Jews were tormented, expelled, and murdered. A pogrom was a party amid mud: as Leon Trotsky (born Lev Bronstein) said: “The doss-house tramp is king. A trembling slave an hour ago, hounded by police and starvation, he now feels himself an unlimited despot. Everything is allowed to him, he is capable of anything, he is the master of property and honour, of life and death.” Christians were forbidden usury, but Jews, who were not allowed to enter the professions or own land, were not: hence the trope of the Jewish love of money. anti-Semitism is ­religious in its beginnings and its acts: it has ­always come from a place beneath thought, too deep to probe, and too deep to forget. Jews were blamed for every ill afflicting the wider society: Communism and Capitalism. If they were ­secular, they were a fifth column. If they were religious, they did not mix. The German towns that voted most enthusiastically for Hitler were also the towns that in the medieval period most enthusiastically murdered their Jews. We will be able to foretell some of the pogroms of the future this way, though in many places there are no Jews left to kill.

One phenomenon of anti-Semitism is its ­ability to mutate over history: from religious hatred to ethnic hatred to hatred of Israel in any form. If the marchers want a two-state ­solution, a pathway to peace, they do not say so. They chant “From the river to the sea”, which is a call for ethnic cleansing at best, and genocide at worst, though many do not know the name of the river, or the name of the sea.

European antisemites fall into three categories. There is the old style, which is waning, and two new ones. The first are affluent bourgeois Leftists who, marinated in anti-racist discourse but unwilling to give up any material privilege, launder their souls using Jews. Increasingly they are very young, and they are fond of groupthink. They want to think themselves good, and, with every atrocity against Jews, they project Jews as a greater evil to keep up with themselves. There are narcissistic, and immune to facts: they are also, for progressives, laughably in tune with the gospels. They are the type that will not call Hamas terrorists despite all evidence; the type that, when told by the BBC that Israel bombed a hospital, would not wait before spreading the blood libel around the world. There are ensconced in universities, the arts, and parts of the media: they are the pseudo-intelligentsia and their acolytes. They want to think themselves apart from the ­Capitalist world they benefit from so richly, and this is one of the ways they do it.

There is also a Muslim fundamentalist element: parts of the Middle East are soaked in Hitlerite rhetoric, and it is transported back to Europe with immigration. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was an employee of the Third Reich: he took 900 marks a month from them and was assured that the Final Solution would be enacted in the Middle East. The Hamas Charter quotes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – a Russian libel insisting the Jews control the world – as fact. anti-Semitism is useful to the ­tyrants of the Middle East: there is always someone else to blame.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem with Adolf Hitler. Picture: Getty

Much of it is unconscious expiation. What joy it brings them to accuse us of genocide, though the Palestinian population has ­quadrupled since 1948. But genocide sounds better than occupation: genocide is what ­happened to the Jews. The old anti-Semitism insisted the Holocaust didn’t happen. The new anti-Semitism is closer to: what did you expect? One Holocaust does not justify­ another, stated a sign at the Palestine rally in London. I wonder if, for its holder, this other “Holocaust” absolves the first.

As for the root of it, if I had to wager, it’s the separateness that offends, and the desire for separateness. An ancient tribe of the ancient world still existing, and still, despite everything, thriving? They must be mad! People shouldn’t think they are better than other people, my builder posted ponderously on Facebook, when the war began. I think that’s it. The rest is habit.

As for us, I quote Simon Dubnow, a Russian-Jewish historian murdered in Riga in 1941. “Every generation in Israel carries within itself the remnants of worlds created and destroyed during the course of the previous history of the Jewish people. Each generation in turn builds and destroys worlds in its form and image but in the long run continues to weave the thread that binds all the links of the nation into the chain of generations... thus each generation in Israel is more the product of history than its creator”. That, I think, is what people cannot bear. We do not bend: we just keep talking. God hated it, too. What’s next? I don’t know, but nothing good.