The patterns of contemporary antisemitism documented since 2000 substantially echo the patterns documented in the run-up to the Holocaust, with adaptations to the political, technological and demographic conditions of the present. The continuities are not the proposition that contemporary antisemitism will produce another Holocaust; the political and institutional conditions of the post-war democratic states are substantially different from the conditions of inter-war Germany. The continuities are rather the structural features of the prejudice itself: the conspiracy framing, the dual stereotype of the Jew as both insider and outsider, the substitution of antisemitism for class analysis on parts of the political left, the use of the Jew as a symbol of whatever the antisemitic movement opposes, and the recurrence of antisemitism at moments of political and economic stress.
The historical pattern
European antisemitism in its modern political form took shape in the late nineteenth century. The combination of the older Christian theological tradition, the newer racial-biological framing developed by the writers of the German-Austrian volkisch movement (Wilhelm Marr, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Eugen Dühring), and the conspiracy framing exemplified by the 1903 Russian forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, produced a political tradition that was substantially in place by the 1890s and that the Nazi movement substantially adopted from older German and Austrian sources rather than inventing. The historical pattern was that antisemitism rose during economic and political crises (the long depression of the 1870s, the post-First World War German crisis, the early years of the Great Depression), that it provided a framework for explaining widely-felt social dislocation in terms that did not require structural analysis of the actual causes, and that it produced the political space in which more violent movements could become electorally viable.
The post-1945 European political consensus had assumed that this pattern had been broken by the Holocaust itself: that the demonstrated consequences of antisemitic political mobilisation had so discredited the tradition that it could not return. The assumption held substantially through the immediate post-war decades and into the 1990s. It has not held since around 2000.
The rise since 2000
The rise of antisemitic incidents in the major Western democracies has been documented since around 2000 by national monitoring organisations. The Community Security Trust in the United Kingdom, the Anti-Defamation League in the United States, the Service de Protection de la Communauté Juive in France, and equivalent organisations in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden and elsewhere have all recorded substantial year-on-year increases since the early 2000s, with sharp spikes around specific events (the Second Intifada, the 2014 Gaza conflict, the rise of European far-right parties from 2014 onwards, the 7 October 2023 attack on Israel and the subsequent Gaza war).
The 2014 ADL Global 100 survey, the largest single international survey of antisemitic attitudes ever conducted, found that around 26 per cent of the world’s adult population endorsed significant elements of antisemitic propositions. The figure was around 24 per cent in Western Europe, around 19 per cent in Eastern Europe (with substantial variation by country), around 9 per cent in the United Kingdom and the United States, around 74 per cent in the Middle East and North Africa, and around 23 per cent in Asia. The follow-up surveys conducted by the ADL since have shown the pattern stable in most regions and rising in some.
The structural continuities
Several features of contemporary antisemitism reproduce the historical pattern. The conspiracy framing, in which Jews are imagined as a coordinated group operating secretly to influence world events, continues in forms that are substantially recognisable from the nineteenth-century literature: the QAnon conspiracy theories that emerged in the United States from 2017 share substantial structural features with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and have produced direct echoes in some of their named figures and themes. The dual stereotype of the Jew as both excessively powerful and excessively weak, both insider and outsider, both globalist and tribal, recurs in contemporary far-right and far-left rhetoric in ways that earlier writers (Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Sartre in Antisemite and Jew) had identified as central to the historical pattern.
The substitution of antisemitism for class analysis on parts of the political left has been documented by historians of the European socialist and communist movements (Robert Wistrich, Brendan Simms, Jeffrey Herf among others) since the 1970s. The pattern is not new; the August Bebel formulation of antisemitism as “the socialism of fools” dates from the 1890s. What has changed is the substantial reduction in the institutional left’s defences against the substitution as the older socialist intellectual tradition has weakened. The contemporary left antisemitism that has been documented in some European parties and movements since the 2000s is the most-recent expression of a long pattern.
The role of antisemitism as a political symbol of whatever movements oppose has continued. Far-right movements use Jews as the symbol of cosmopolitan modernity; some far-left and Islamist movements use Jews as the symbol of Western imperialism; both use Israel as the contemporary focus that allows older themes to be expressed in apparently legitimate contemporary terms. The distinction between legitimate criticism of Israeli government policy (which is a normal feature of democratic politics) and the use of Israel as a vehicle for older antisemitic themes (which is something else) is the principal contemporary line of analytical work.
What is different
The differences between contemporary antisemitism and its inter-war predecessor are substantial. The post-war European democratic states have constitutional and legal frameworks that constrain political movements in ways the Weimar Republic did not; the international human rights and minority protection framework provides legal recourse that Jewish populations of inter-war Europe did not have; the existence of the State of Israel provides a refuge that Jewish populations of inter-war Europe did not have; the substantial integration of contemporary Jewish populations into the political and social life of the democratic states is at a level higher than was the case in much of inter-war Europe.
The differences are real and matter. The historians who have written most carefully on the question (Yehuda Bauer, Deborah Lipstadt, David Nirenberg, Anthony Julius among others) have been clear that contemporary antisemitism is not a re-run of inter-war antisemitism and that the historical analogy should not be pressed too far. What the analogy does is to identify the structural features of the prejudice that have continued, to provide a framework for understanding why the rise since 2000 has the shape it has, and to inform the policy and institutional responses that the documenting organisations have advocated for.
See also
- The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
- Hannah Arendt
- The Weimar Republic
- The Netherlands
- Antisemitism in the UK at Record Levels
- The Living Memory Problem
- Social Media and Holocaust Denial
Sources
- Robert Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, Random House, 2010
- David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, W. W. Norton, 2013
- Deborah E. Lipstadt, Antisemitism: Here and Now, Schocken, 2019
- Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust, Harvard University Press, 2006
- Anti-Defamation League, ADL Global 100: An Index of Antisemitism, 2014 and subsequent updates, https://global100.adl.org
- Community Security Trust (UK), annual Antisemitic Incidents Report, https://cst.org.uk