ABSTRACT
Anti-Semitism1 is not a new phenomenon in the European context, where the term was coined in 1879 to describe the then hatred of Jews. Two millennia of anti-Semitism culminated in the Holocaust of the twentieth century. This genocide appeared to make anti-Semitism a taboo, but less than 70 years after the Holocaust this phenomenon has once again become manifest on a scale that has unsettled European Jewish life. This new anti-Semitism, which is tied in with the Arab-Israeli conflict, involves Muslim and Arab communities in Europe in what Roger Cukierman, President of the French Jewish umbrella body, Conseil Représentatif des Institutions juives de France (CRIF), has described as European Muslims attacking European Jews “in the shadow” of the conflict in the Middle East (Cukierman 2004). Anti-Semitism has taken different forms during different historical periods. There was the pagan form under the Romans, when Jews were oppressed for their rejection of idol worship; Christian antiSemitism based on reaction to the Jewish perception of deicide and refusal to accept Jesus as the messiah; Nazi anti-Semitism based on racial theories; and Soviet anti-Semitism that characterized Jews as bourgeois. In 2000, a new form of anti-Semitism was identified which emerged in response to the outbreak of the Second Palestinian Intifada, dubbed “the new anti-
Semitism” and “Judeophobia.” These terms were coined in A New Antisemitism? Debating Judeophobia in 21st-Century Britain (Iganski and Kosmin 2003), and, while referring in that book to anti-Semitism in the UK, they have been applied more broadly. Introducing their book in a Ha’aretz article, Kosmin and Iganski (2003) define Judeophobia as,
What was recognized as being “new” about this anti-Semitism was that it applied the traditional characteristics of the anti-Semitism that was previously targeted at individual Jews to the collective Jewish State of Israel. Whereas once it was individual Jews who were nefariously propagated as being bloodthirsty, malicious and inherently evil, with the new anti-Semitism it is the Jewish state that embodies these inherently pernicious characteristics. For the new antiSemitism, there is a very clear connection between Israel and the Diaspora. In 2004, the then British Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, described how the new anti-Semitism is aimed at Israel but impacted on World Jewry:
Since it first became manifest in 2000, the new anti-Semitism has erupted in the Diaspora whenever the Israeli-Arab conflict has descended into open warfare, as occurred when Israel was at war with Hezbollah in 2006 in Lebanon, and with Hamas in Gaza in 2009 and 2012. The outbreaks of new anti-Semitism at these times affected European Jewry but did not appear to threaten its viability in an existential way. However, when the Israeli-Hamas War erupted in July 2014, the rise in anti-Semitic incidents not only reached sudden and new heights, but something changed qualitatively as well as quantitatively in the vilification of and assaults on Jews. So severe was the perception of anti-Semitism that it called into question the sense of belonging, security and future for the Jews of Europe. It is this experience of anti-Semitism and the active role of European Islamic communities in it, along with the implications for European Jewry, that are the focus of this article.
