"Anti-Semitism is on the rise," declares the latest annual survey of global anti-Semitic incidents and expressions from Tel Aviv University's Stephen Roth Institute. True, that much we know already, but the Institute's report for 2013, the latest in a series stretching back more than twenty years, offers some compelling insights as to how this has come about.
Utilizing a methodology that is explained in the report, the Institute determined that there were 554 "violent anti-Semitic acts, perpetrated with weapons or without" in 2013. The highest number of these, 116, occurred in France, where the Jewish community, despite amounting to only one percent of the population, was the target of an astonishing 40 percent of racist assaults the previous year. Additionally, other countries noted a rise in incidents in 2013 when compared with 2012, including Canada (83 compared with 74) and Germany (36 compared with 23.)
Significantly, a rise in incidents was also reported in Russia (15 compared with 11) and Ukraine (23 compared to 15.) Given Vladimir Putin's cynical exploitation of anti-Semitism in Ukraine, a phenomenon he has subsumed beneath a previously little-known form of prejudice defined as "Russophobia," the report provides valuable documentation of the persistence of anti-Semitism within those circles loyal to Putin.
Last April, for example, a regime loyalist in the Duma, Irina Yarovaya, fingered television presenter Vladimir Pozner's Jewish origin as the reason he opposes Putin. The report also quotes Putin himself as having made the blatantly false claim, in June 2013, that 85 percent of Soviet government officials were Jews who had harmed not only their own people, but the entire mosaic of religions and ethnicities in Russia.
Such views feed the growing tendency among nationalist groups to portray the outrages of the Soviet era as "Jewish" crimes. They also fuel the already widespread predilection in Russian society to view Jewish political influence in conspiratorial terms, as evidenced most recently by the assertion of Rory Suchet, an anchor with Russian mouthpiece RT, that "Jewish money controls a huge amount of foreign policy in Washington." With such enlightened individuals also making the case for Russia's seizure of Crimea, it beggars belief that anyone could take at face value Putin's insistence that he is defending Jewish rights, even if anti-Semitism does remain a real and worrying phenomenon in Ukraine.
The surge of anti-Semitism in Europe's post-Communist states is particularly pronounced in Hungary. Alongside France and Belgium, the report points out, Hungary is the country where "the situation seems to be the worst." While the recent election in which one in five Hungarians voted for the neo-Nazi Jobbik party falls outside the report's timeframe, the analysis here contributes a great deal to our understanding of that outcome.
Physical attacks on Hungary's approximately 100,000 Jews are, says the report, still rare. However, the discourse of anti-Semitism has swelled to such an extent that the prominent Hungarian rabbi Shlomo Koves says "you can feel it" in the street. Jobbik is not the only culprit; anti-Semites are visible among the entourage of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who condemned anti-Semitism in general terms when addressing the World Jewish Congress plenary in Budapest, but studiously avoided any mention of Jobbik specifically.
Jobbik is important because, in many ways, the party represents the future of anti-Semitism in Europe. Classified as a far right party, Jobbik is not dissimilar from other racist organizations in Eastern Europe insofar as it operates a uniformed paramilitary arm and glorifies the country's collaborationist leadership during the Second World War. However, in its strident attacks against Zionism and Israel, Jobbik sounds like it could belong to the far left just as easily. The anti-Zionist statements that Jobbik leader Gabor Vona has uttered publicly include the line that "Israel operates the world's largest concentration camp," a theme that is common in the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement in the United States and Western Europe.
As the Roth Institute report makes clear, this merging of far left and far right expressions of anti-Semitism is visible elsewhere in Europe. In France especially, the popularization of the quenelle, an inverted Nazi salute pioneered by Dieudonné M'bala M'bala, a notorious comedian and rabble rouser, has encouraged what the report calls a "cultural code" of European anti-Semitism, whereby the participation of black and Muslim communities in Jew-hatred is encouraged, and at the same time identification of such incidents as being "anti-Semitic" is willfully denied. As with Jobbik, Dieudonné's aim is to target Jews while simultaneously denying that we should be concerned by this thing called "anti-Semitism." The implications of this are enormous, not least for Holocaust commemoration, which Dieudonne tellingly demonizes as "pornography for the memory."
The principal impression left by the 2013 report is that the hoary myth of an international Judeo-Zionist conspiracy is what animates anti-Semitism today, and takes it well beyond its traditional white, European heartland. As Professor Robert Wistrich, the world's leading scholar of anti-Semitism, argues on Israel's Midah website, the idea of "global Jewish power" has "provided an additional bond between the radical Right in the West, the far Left and militant Muslims from the Middle East." If current trends continue–and there is, sadly, no reason to expect them not to–those bonds will tighten even further. So will the most disturbing aspect of the report's findings: the reluctance of most Jews victimized by anti-Semitism to report their experiences in the first place, which suggests that the total number of incidents we know about is merely a shadow of the true figure.