Standard Complaint
With the recent shooting in France of a rabbi and three Jewish children, people are wondering about anti-Semitism in Europe. Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, claims that European nations are far more anti-Semitic that the United States.
This I can believe. I've seen the same polls Foxman has. There are a number of reasons why this might be, many historical. But I think a major one is that Europe (not to mention everywhere else outside Israel and the U.S.) has very few Jews and, when it comes to anti-Semitic and related beliefs, simply doesn't have as much a counter when such views are spread.
Some claim the actions of Israel help give rise to their hatred, but I think that's go it backwards. Because people in Europe (and elsewhere) are already more prone to anti-Semitism, they're also more willing to hold Israel to a standard which no other country has to meet.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:11 AM
2 Comments:
I agree that this is the major reason.
Do you think that some of the following might also be factors?
1) If Europeans have good historical memories -- which they certainly did once -- then they may remember the long history of friction between Jews and Christians (and later, Jews and post-Christians) that go back nine centuries. [Interestingly, no farther than that. Jews and Christians got along quite well in Western Europe from around 700 to 1100 CE.] Of course, this history contained a lot more mistreatment of Jews than mistreatment by Jews, but if non-Jewish Europeans decide to focus on the latter, that may increase their antisemitism. The USA, on the other hand, had extremely little of this sort of thing compared to Europe.
2) Western Europe has a very significant Muslim population today. For example, in France there are ten times as many Muslims as there are Jews. In the USA, by contrast, Jews are fairly commonplace and Muslims are still exotic in most places.
3) For more than a century after the French Revolution, the primary political division in Europe was between the conservatives who favored monarchy and a close Church-state relationship and the liberals who were for secularization and sometimes anti-clerical. During that era, most European Jews were aligned with the latter. But at some point in the mid twentieth century, this dynamic reversed. Christian Churches began to strongly emphasize their connection to Judaism, while radical secularists began to lump Jews and Christians together as representatives of pre-modern religions. So today it seems that all the groups who are pushing to ban circumcision and kosher slaughter are on the secular left, and I am fairly sure that dislike of Israel is correlated to being on the left as well.
If factor # 3 is very significant, then I would expect anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment to increase as Europe secularizes even more.
I think these are good points. But what's always surprising is how anti-Semites seem to figure out ways to hate Jews no matter what. So you get the right accusing the Jews of behind behind communism, while the left accuses them of being behind capitalism. For that matter, in most nations, Jews are insignificant in number, but people there still seem to blame Jews for their particular problems.
Even in America, which has more Jews than any other country, they're only 2% of the population. If you asked people, I'd bet they'd guess the number is considerably larger. (Though some of this is probably because Jews are overachievers who are statistically overrepresented in successful and powerful positions. Happily, in America few view this as negative or suspicious.)
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