David QuinnIt is abhorrent that we have contrived to make parts of Europe unsafe for Jews once again, writes David Quinn
It is absolutely extraordinary to watch news footage of soldiers guarding Jewish schools, shops and synagogues in countries like France and Belgium. Only 70 years after the Holocaust, within the living memory of many people still alive today, Jews in Europe are threatened again.
For reasons that are understandable, most of the attention since the murder of 17 people in Paris by Islamist terrorists has focused on the 12 people killed at the offices of the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo.
Far less attention has been paid to the four people killed in a Jewish shop. However, it is Jews in Europe who are under far more threat of violence than journalists.
If a journalist steers away from attacking Islam and does not want to blaspheme against Mohammad, or is scared to, he or she will be perfectly safe. But Jews are being attacked simply because they are Jews. They can be perfectly ordinary people going about their daily business and find themselves the target of a bombing or a shooting. They can be attending synagogue as we would attend Mass. They can be simply out shopping or bringing their children to school, and be attacked.
Europe, of course, has a very long history of anti-semitism and much of it, shamefully, has come from Christians. Jews have been called ‘Christ-killers’. Their very separateness has caused resentment and hatred.
Scapegoat
In Europe for many centuries, Judaism was really the only other religion permitted to exist alongside Christianity. But this made Jews very conspicuous and it made them an easy target and an easy scapegoat for anything that went wrong in a community.
Christians themselves suffered the same fate in Ancient Rome. Like the Jews they refused to acknowledge the Emperor as a god but, unlike the Jews, they were seeking converts and this made them a bigger threat to the authority of Rome. Because they were still few in number in the early centuries AD, they made for a soft target and for convenient scapegoats as when a fire broke out in Rome in the reign of Nero.
So Christians should have been sensitive to how easy it is to become a persecuted minority. It is the fate of many Christians in many parts of the world today, in fact.
But in the centuries of Christian dominance since, this was all forgotten.
What also made Jews stand out and a made them a target of resentment was the fact that, for a long time, Christians who lent money could charge no interest as this was considered to be usury. Jews often filled the lending gap in the market and this led to stereotypes of the greedy, grasping Jew that is found in the likes of The Merchant of Venice and in some of the works of Charles Dickens.
Insult was then added to injury by sometimes forcing Jews to wear a star of David on their clothes for easy identification.
Anti-semitism was not and is not restricted to the Christian world; there seem to be very few places where it has not erupted.
The justifications vary from place to place but something about Jewish separateness seems to cause resentment again and again. Indeed, whenever any community is separate, distinctive and ‘other’, Jewish or non-Jewish, resentment is the reaction and that often spills over into persecution.
The former Chief Rabbi of Britain, Lord Jonathan Sacks, has noted that in Europe at least, anti-semitism has always been justified by appeal to whatever is taken to be the highest value of society at the time.
So for many centuries, when Europe was religious, Jews were attacked in the name of God.
Then, from around the mid-19th Century until the mid-20th Century, culminating in the Holocaust Jews were attacked in the name of ‘science’, specifically the idea that some races are superior to others.
Extreme
Adolf Hitler took this to its extreme and regarded the Jews as so inferior and so dangerous to society that they must simply be eliminated in a ‘final solution’.
Today, says Rabbi Sacks, the Jewish religion is often attacked in the name of ‘rights’. Therefore, the killing of animals according to kosher law is denounced as cruelty to animals and there are growing calls to ban circumcision of infants as a form of cruelty also.
In Western Europe, it is Jews living in France who are under the most threat. There are two reasons. The far right is strong in France and the far-right has always been anti-semitic.
The second reason, the main reason, is France’s very large Muslim population which stands at around five million compared with half a million Jews.
Within the Muslim population there is an ultra-radical core which is willing to kill anyone it deems to be an enemy of Islam.
What is making things worse is that members of this ultra-radical core are becoming battle-hardened in war zones like Libya, Syria and Iraq fighting for terrorist organisations such as Islamic State.
They then return to Europe wanting to continue the ‘jihad’ (holy war) on our shores.
The result of this is that Jews are leaving France again. Post-World War II the Jewish population of France peaked at 600,000. Now it is down to 500,000 and much of this is due to emigration with many French Jews opting for Israel.
It is abhorrent that we have contrived to make parts of Europe unsafe for Jews once again. It is doubly shameful that it is not a far bigger issue than it is.