When I was a boy, my grandma – who had fled with her family from Poland to Britain as a baby girl around the turn of the last century – would tell me that she always had a suitcase packed. “Just in case,” she’d say. “You never know when they’ll turn on the Jews.”
I thought, in the rather arrogant, know- it-all way that young men tend to have, that she was – perfectly understandably, given her and our family’s history of persecution – living in the past. After the Holocaust, real, serious anti-Semitism – the sort where Jews were killed for being Jews, rather than the odd nasty comment – was a thing of the past, in civilised Europe, at least.
And for most of my adult life, nothing really shook that view.
But today, in Europe in 2015, it turns out my grandma was right. Within 70 years of the Holocaust, Jews are being killed in Europe for no other reason than that they are Jews.
The scale, of course, does not compare with any of the 19th-century pogroms, let alone the Holocaust. And, crucially, it is not the authorities who are turning on Jews. Quite the opposite. Both Manuel Valls and Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the French and Danish prime ministers, have made heartfelt and moving speeches expressing their horror at what has happened in the countries.
The threat comes not from the authorities, not the vast mass of the populations. It comes from a minority within a minority – radical Islamists, who are driven by a desire to kill Jews.
But for all that, it is a real threat, and it is not going away. And for Jews in Europe, that knowledge is now with us as we live and breathe and go about our daily lives.
As editor of the world’s oldest and leading Jewish newspaper, not a day now goes by when I am not asked – as here, now – to talk about how it feels to be a Jew in Europe today. What can I say? That we are afraid? Of course we are. I do not have to tell an Irish readership what it feels like to know that there are people who wish to see you dead for no reason other than your religion.
But there are two important factors that need to be borne in mind.
Fear vs flight
First, fear is not the same as flight, not even the precursor to it. The week after the Paris murders, the
Jewish Chronicle
polled British Jews to ask if they had considered leaving Britain. Some 88 per cent said that they had not. Only 11 per cent said that they had even thought about it.
Why should we? I am British. I happen also to be a Jew, which makes me a target to the radical Islamists. But why should I wish to leave my home country any more than any of my non-Jewish neighbours?
So when Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, said to me and my fellow European Jews last Sunday that “Israel is your home”, I simply ignored him. In isolation, there is nothing unusual about his words. Every Israeli prime minister encourages Jews to live in Israel; that, after all, is the point of Israel – a home for Jews.
But his words were not in isolation. They were in the context of the murder the day before of Dan Uzan, killed for being a Jew doing his communal duty guarding his synagogue.
It is, incidentally, a sign of how used Jews have become to lesser attacks – thrown bricks, daubings and such like – that we have for years – decades – taken the need for security guards outside all communal buildings for granted.
Netanyahu’s words were also in the context of the Israeli election on March 17th, one of the most closely contested Israeli elections for many years.
But fear is not flight. Although British emigration to Israel rose by 20 per cent last year (before Paris and Copenhagen, obviously) to 617, the longer-term pattern has been a fall – in 2012 the number was 700 and in 2009 it was 853. It may well be that the figure rises significantly this year and next, but the numbers remain relatively small.
Which brings us to the second important factor to remember. I write as a British Jew. Elsewhere, the picture is far bleaker. It will have come as a shock to few European Jews that it was in France that Amedy Coulibaly murdered four Jews. France leads the world in home-grown anti-Semitism.
France had more violent anti-Semitic incidents in 2013 than any other country. Jews were the target of 40 per cent of all racist crimes – even though they comprise less than 1 per cent of the population. Attacks on Jews have risen sevenfold since the 1990s. In France, Jewish flight is accelerating. At the start of this decade, France had the largest Jewish community in the EU at about 500,000. It is expected to fall to 400,000 within a few years.
Anti-Semitic culture
No wonder, after the Jewish school shooting in Toulouse in 2012, in which four people were murdered at point-blank range by a French-born jihadist trained in the Middle East, the growing support for Marine Le Pen’s National Front, the mass popularity of anti-Semitic public figures such as comedian Dieudonné and now the kosher shop murders. Such incidents – not to mention the day-to-day assaults – frame life for Jews in France.
Statistically, I know that Britain – and Europe as a whole – remains the safest place there has ever been for Jews and, like the rest of the community, I tell myself that all the time.
But when I also know there are hundreds of jihadis on the street, all with murderous intent towards me, the statistics do not always tell the full story.
Stephen Pollard is editor of the Jewish Chronicle