Europe’s Anti-Semitism Comes Out of the Shadows
SARCELLES,
France — From the immigrant enclaves of the Parisian suburbs to the
drizzly bureaucratic city of Brussels to the industrial heartland of
Germany, Europe’s old demon returned this summer. “Death to the Jews!”
shouted protesters at pro-Palestinian rallies in Belgium and France.
“Gas the Jews!” yelled marchers at a similar protest in Germany.
The ugly threats were surpassed by uglier violence. Four people were fatally shot in May
at the Jewish Museum in Brussels. A Jewish-owned pharmacy in this Paris
suburb was destroyed in July by youths protesting Israel’s military
campaign in Gaza. A synagogue in Wuppertal, Germany, was attacked with
firebombs. A Swedish Jew was beaten with iron pipes. The list goes on.
The
scattered attacks have raised alarm about how Europe is changing and
whether it remains a safe place for Jews. An increasing number of Jews,
if still relatively modest in total, are now migrating to Israel. Others
describe “no go” zones in Muslim districts of many European cities
where Jews dare not travel.
But
there is also concern about what some see as an insidious “softer”
anti-Jewish bias, which they fear is creeping into the European
mainstream and undermining the postwar consensus to root out
anti-Semitism. Now the question is whether a subtle societal shift is
occurring that has made anti-Jewish remarks or behavior more acceptable.
“The
fear is that now things are blatantly being said openly, and no one is
batting an eyelid,” said Jessica Frommer, 36, a secular Jew who works
for a nonprofit organization in Brussels. “Modern Europe is based on
stopping what happened in the Second World War. And now 70 years later,
people standing near the European Parliament are shouting, ‘Death to
Jews!’ ”
This
is not the Europe of 1938. French leaders have strongly condemned the
violence. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany this month led a rally
against anti-Semitism in Berlin at which she told Germans, “It is our
national and civic duty to fight anti-Semitism.”
Europe
has seen protests and outbursts of anti-Semitism whenever the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict has erupted, and some analysts say this
summer’s anger is a cyclical episode that like others will fade away.
Some note that the number of reported anti-Semitic incidents this year
in France, for instance, is well below some years in the 2000s.
Yet
as European support for the Palestinian cause and criticism of Israel
have hardened, many Jews describe a blurring of distinctions between
being anti-Israel and being anti-Jew.
With
Europe still shaking from a populist backlash against fiscal austerity,
some Jews speak of feeling politically isolated, without an ideological
home. Many left-wing political parties are anti-Israel. Many right-wing
parties, some with anti-Semitic origins, are extremist and virulently
anti-immigrant. And many Jews who have voted with the Socialist Party in
France and Belgium worry that those parties are weak and becoming more
dependent on fast-growing Muslim voting blocs.
Even
among those inclined to condemn racism in any form, fighting
anti-Semitism is no longer seen as a priority, with Jews often perceived
as privileged compared with Muslims and other minorities confronted
with discrimination.
Many
younger Muslims often seem alienated in Europe. Struggling to find work
and frustrated by their lack of acceptance, a small but vocal group of
them has become inflamed by the politics of the Middle East, especially
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
European
officials are deeply concerned that radical Islam, nurtured in the
Middle East, could take root in Europe. Mehdi Nemmouche, a French Muslim
arrested in connection with the killings at the Jewish Museum in
Brussels, fought as a jihadist in Syria. A French journalist who was
held captive in Syria until April said Mr. Nemmouche had been one of his
torturers.
“We
are a microcosm of the Middle East,” said Philip Carmel, European
policy director for the European Jewish Congress. “The Middle East is
being imported into Europe.”
Visits
to some of the flash points of the summer violence revealed a picture
of what Prime Minister Manuel Valls of France has called a “new
anti-Semitism.” In Sarcelles, the Paris suburb where pro-Palestinian
protests spiraled into riots, the alienation of France’s immigrants and
minorities lies just below the surface. In Brussels, the headquarters of
the European Union, some secular Jews described a changing atmosphere
and questioned whether it was time to leave.
And
in Wuppertal, Germany, a city proud of its commitment to religious and
ethnic diversity, the attempted firebombing of a synagogue exposed
underlying tensions that became even clearer this month when,
unexpectedly, a group of Muslim men patrolled a neighborhood wearing
makeshift uniforms that said “Shariah Police.”
The French Melting Pot
On
the afternoon of July 20, a siege mentality gripped Little Jerusalem,
the Jewish commercial district in Sarcelles. A crowd of young Jewish men
had gathered at the synagogue as a pro-Palestinian protest was held a
few blocks away. France’s Interior Ministry had tried to ban the
protest, which spun into a riot. Cars were burning. Young men were
throwing rocks as the police fired tear gas. A Jewish-owned pharmacy was
set on fire.
“We
were all concentrated here to defend the synagogue,” said Levi Cohen
Solal, 21, who joined the human cordon outside the synagogue. “Everybody
was scared.”
Blocked
by the police, the rioters never reached the synagogue, but Sarcelles
became a televised symbol of France’s new anti-Semitism — a depiction
many local residents did not recognize. A working-class suburb where
generations of immigrants are packed into government housing, Sarcelles
is a melting pot of religions and ethnicities, where many people speak
of a largely peaceful coexistence.
To
many residents, the demonstration, which was organized by outsiders on
social media, was an indictment not of Sarcelles, but of France. Youth
unemployment is soaring, especially in immigrant havens like Sarcelles,
and many French-born children and grandchildren of immigrants have
become alienated from French society.
“They
have a real hatred against the state,” said Bassi Konaté, a city social
worker, who added that many of the protesters came from poorer
districts nearby. “A big proportion of these people feel neglected. A
lot of these people don’t know anything about Gaza. But they want to
confront the police.”
An
early sign that these broader resentments were morphing into more open
expressions of anti-Semitism came with the emergence several years ago
of Dieudonné M’bala M’bala,
a French comedian who lashed out at Jews and played down the Holocaust.
He has since allied himself with Jean-Marie Le Pen, the 86-year-old
founder of the far-right National Front, who this summer used an
apparently anti-Semitic pun, which alluded to Nazi crematories, as a
riposte to a Jewish critic. Many of the comedian’s shows have since been
banned in France, but his popularity has continued to rise, unnerving
many Jews.
“For
the past four or five years, we have felt a growing insecurity,” said
David Harroch, who runs a Jewish bookstore in Little Jerusalem. “My
customers tell me how worried they are about the climate here, the
situation. A lot of people have left.”
Israeli
officials predict that as many as 6,000 Jews will migrate from France
this year, a stark reversal from the 1950s, when Sephardic Jews, Arabs
and others began arriving in Sarcelles from North Africa. A booming
economy made work plentiful.
But
during France’s recession in the late 1970s, the city’s ethnic groups
became pitted against one another for limited public resources. Rahsaan
Maxwell, a political scientist who has studied Sarcelles’s ethnic
groups, said the Sephardic Jews had incurred resentment because they
were better organized and able to mobilize politically to win certain
perks from the elected local council: a special Jewish section in the
local cemetery, widening of a road in front of the main synagogue,
kosher offerings at an annual city dinner for the elderly, and
segregated swimming hours for men and women at a city pool.
In
his 2012 book, “Ethnic Minority Migrants in Britain and France,” Mr.
Maxwell wrote that Sephardic Jews became so influential that “when
Israel was at war with Lebanon in the early 1980s, Sephardic Jewish
activists in Sarcelles were aggressive about using it as a litmus test
for local politicians to see whether they supported Israel and the
Jewish people.”
Yet
many Jews and Muslims born in that era grew up together without rancor
in government housing. Not far from one of the city’s storefront mosques
is a small Superette grocery owned by a Muslim family. One of the
owners, Abdel Badaz, recently stood behind the counter with a childhood
friend, Mickaël Berdah, 36, a Jew whose family emigrated decades ago
from Tunisia. They both criticized the riot as the work of young
troublemakers.
“When
you’ve grown up in the neighborhood, and you know everybody, there
isn’t that kind of hate,” Mr. Berdah said. “When there is that kind of
hate, it is at the roots, something about the way parents have educated
their children.”
Later,
near the grocery, a tall teenager pedaled his bicycle toward two
journalists and shouted at them to leave, saying the media had lied
about Sarcelles. The youth, Diakité Ismael, 19, the French-born son of
Senegalese immigrants, soon calmed down and, like others, argued that
there was no animosity in Sarcelles between local Muslims and Jews.
“Look,” he said, as a bearded Jewish man in a dark suit and skullcap walked by, “there’s one.”
But
when asked about Gaza, Mr. Ismael became agitated, rambling and warning
that the world was hurtling toward a catastrophe. He said he had seen
video of an Israeli bomb hitting a funeral in Gaza. “Somehow, some Jews
control politics, information, business and finance,” he said. “I’m not
talking about the Jews here. I’m talking about Jews in general.”
And a lot of morons believe that right here in the United States
(see the editorials at 321gold.com)
And a lot of morons believe that right here in the United States
(see the editorials at 321gold.com)
“Jews, in general,” he added, “only let you see what they want you to see.”
In Brussels, Heightened Alert
Music
rose from the center of Brussels on Sunday, with joggers and bicyclists
moving freely down city streets as the seat of the European Union held
its annual no-car day. It had the giddy air of a street fair, if less so
for the city’s Jewish organizations, which the police had placed under
heightened security since two recent incidents.
The
first happened the previous Sunday, Sept. 14, which marked the European
Day of Jewish Culture. As people gathered to dedicate a plaque at a
Holocaust memorial, youths hurled stones and bottles until the police
arrived. Three days later, a fire erupted on an upper floor of a
synagogue in the city’s Anderlecht district; the authorities are
investigating the incident as arson.
It
was the May shooting at the Jewish Museum in Brussels — and the
subsequent arrest of Mr. Nemmouche — that attracted international
attention, as four people were killed, including two Israelis. But there
have been smaller incidents that received less notice: a Turkish shop
owner in Liège who posted a sign saying he would serve dogs but not
Jews, a voice on the intercom of a commuter train that announced a stop
as "Auschwitz" and ordered all Jews to get off.
“This
summer, I started to see the world in a different way,” said Marco
Mosseri, 31, a native Italian who works in the automotive industry in
Brussels. “I was scared. I spent several nights without sleep. For the
first time, I was thinking that maybe I could die from my religion.”
With
its chocolate shops, Trappist beers and gray gloom, Brussels is the
center of Europe’s sprawling bureaucracy, a symbol of the loathed
policies of austerity. But Brussels also embodies the demographics
transforming much of urban Europe, with generations of Muslim immigrants
and their descendants now representing roughly a quarter of the
population.
The
Jewish community is small, about 20,000 people, most of them
assimilated, secular Jews like Mr. Mosseri, who usually do not draw
attention to their heritage. (A recent report issued jointly by two European Jewish organizations found that 40 percent of European Jews hide
their Jewishness.) Now some secular Jews say they have stopped wearing a
necklace with the Star of David, or allowing their children to wear
T-shirts for a Jewish summer camp on public buses or trains.
And since the start of the conflict in Gaza this summer, many describe social media, especially Facebook, as a swamp of hatred.
“I
have friends who are never political and they are posting things about
Gaza every day,” said Ms. Frommer, the employee of the nonprofit
organization. “It seems like an obsession. Is your obsession because you
want to save children, or because you have a problem with Jews?”
In
a city so devoted to politics, the issue of Israel can seem unavoidable
to some Jews, even those who strive to be apolitical or tend to be
critical of Israeli policy. Ms. Frommer grew up in Brussels, but then
left for college in Britain, followed by a long stint working in
Cambodia. When she returned to Brussels four years ago, she was struck
by how much more polarized life seemed. Her Jewish friends were sticking
closer together as office chatter now sometimes bore a sharper edge.
This
summer, one of her Belgian colleagues repeatedly mentioned the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “He would often try to bring up the
subject when I tried not to,” she said. “Then the subject would shift
from Israel to Jews. Then it was, ‘Were there really six million Jews
killed in the Second World War?’ ”
Nor
was the comment isolated. There have been signs that anti-Jewish
sentiment transcended the immediate backlash against the Gaza war. In
Hungary, the rise of the far-right Jobbik party has brought concerns
that anti-Semitic views are gaining mainstream traction.
In
Italy, extreme right-wing activists were blamed for a flurry of
anti-Jewish graffiti, including Nazi swastikas, on buildings in various
cities. In Rome, f liers calling for a boycott of
at least 40 Jewish-owned stores appeared last month with the signature
of the far-right group Vita Est Militia. Italian investigators were also
looking into whether such far-right parties were building alliances
with extremist left-wing groups.
In
Brussels, several pro-Palestinian marches were held this summer, most
of which were peaceful, but a few bore an anti-Semitic edge, including
shouts of “Death to Jews!” While Belgian politicians quickly condemned
the shooting at the Jewish Museum, some Jews felt the response to the
protests, including that of the center-left Socialists, was tepid at
best.
“The
Socialist Party is afraid, because of the votes here in Belgium,” said
Dr. Maurice Sosnowski, an anesthesiologist and prominent Jewish leader
in Brussels. “In Belgium, they are not willing to speak loudly, because
there are a lot of Muslims.”
In
the nonprofit world of Brussels, the politics of Israel, which some on
the European left view as essentially the pursuit of racist objectives
against Palestinians, have made it difficult to keep the fight against
anti-Semitism high on the agenda.
“Some see it in conflict with the anti-racism movement,” said Robin Sclafani, director of the Brussels-based group A Jewish Contribution to an Inclusive Europe.
The organization, also known as CEJI, provides anti-discrimination
training to teachers, social workers and others. Ms. Sclafani said she
now receives numerous requests for training sessions to combat
discrimination against Muslims, yet there is little interest in
workshops on anti-Semitism.
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