The disgraceful spectacle of the rise of ancient anti-Semitism

The sudden upsurge of anti-Semitism in the Western world has been a shocking and disgusting development. In the United Kingdom, from which the Jews were banished from 1290 to 1655, anti-Semitic incidents increased from 1,500 in 2023 to over 4,300 in 2023 and have continued to increase. The recent ban, allegedly for their own safety, of supporters of a Tel Aviv sports team from attending a match that team played in England, a ban that was most conspicuously demanded by a Labour Member of Parliament, is the latest admission by any of the levels of government in the United Kingdom that they are no longer capable of assuring the civic rights of Jews.

Throughout most of Europe there has been the disgraceful spectacle of the rise of ancient anti-Semitism from racist working-class hooligans to join with the new anti-Semitism of Muslim immigrants and their descendants abusing the hospitality of the countries to which they or their parents have emigrated. These otherwise vastly dissimilar groups have joined not only in crude racist demonstrations, but in this terrible explosion of insults, vandalism, and assault against Jewish people.

For complicated and entirely discreditable reasons, anti-Semitism has been active and evident throughout Europe since the much-persecuted Christians became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century. The Romans initially considered the Christians to be a branch of the Jews, as fellow monotheists, and the Christians, as upstarts who unlike the Jews had a vocation to proselytise and expand their religion, attracted extraordinary persecution, most notoriously when the Emperor Nero unjustly scapegoated them as responsible for the great Roman fires of 64 AD the status of the Jews fluctuated and in general, after the Persians liberated them from the Babylonian captivity of Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BC and the return to Israel in the 539 BC, they flourished under the relative liberality of the Persian Empire, the Seleucids who governed in the wake of Alexander the Great, and the Romans.

There was a substantial Jewish community in Rome by the first century BC and they had the political sagacity to support Julius Caesar who treated them benignly in Rome and in Judea. Jews came out in strength to Caesar’s funeral and after Mark Antony’s famous address the other mourners listened appreciatively as the large Jewish contingent sang the Kadesh, the moving Jewish prayer for the honoured dead. It was not until 70 AD when the Jews of Judea revolted for reasons that the Romans considered to be completely inadequate as they had not been mistreated, that Titus, subsequently a generally enlightened Roman Emperor, subdued Judea and destroyed the temple.

For many centuries Jews were tormented with the absurd collective guilt of “Christ-killers,” although that was really the act of the Sanhedrin and the overwhelming majority of early Christians were converts from Judaism. This and not persecution was the cause of the sharp reduction in the world population of Jews in the early centuries of the Christian Era. Beyond that blood libel, the principal perceived shortcomings of Jewish people were that they were different in their dress and religious observances and they were comparatively highly motivated and successful.

It was widely hoped and believed that anti-Semitism would subside after the unspeakable massacre of the Holocaust in Europe by the Nazis and their collaborators, in which approximately half of the 12 million victims who perished in the death camps were Jews and constituted approximately half of the Jewish population of the world. It was unimaginable that the culture of Goethe and Beethoven could commit such crimes, and with so many accomplices from other sophisticated European civilisations. The magnitude of these horrors was the underlying reason for the support of the creation of the State of Israel, on the joint sponsorship of the United States and the Soviet Union.

Israel has been one of the world’s most successful countries although it has technically been at war throughout its history of 77 years. Its military achievement in the current war inflicted upon it by the invasion and massacre by Hamas on October 7, 2023 has been remarkable: Hezbollah severely reduced and the Assad regime in Syria crushed, 80 per cent of the Hamas terrorists killed and more than half of their vast tunnel complex in Gaza destroyed, Iran completely deprived of air defences and a large swath of its leadership killed. The Jewish state has upheld the promise of its founding, that “Never again” would Jews go passively as victims to be slaughtered as they were in the Holocaust.

The Gaza war was begun with a horrible terrorist invasion of Israel. The anti-Semitism that has arisen in the wake of it is a manifestation of the collective psychosis of the Arabs immediately adjacent to Israel who purport to find it intolerable to co-exist with the Jewish state. This bias clearly afflicts many of the Muslim immigrants in the West. The Muslim Gazans and residents of the West Bank have been built up as underdogs opposite the Jewish State. They have the endorsement of our woke, flabby hypocrisy of the professoriat and much of the media and they mislead our youth.

This will subside eventually, but what is more alarming and must be punished at the polls, is that those European political parties such as Labour in the UK are so dependent on the Muslim vote and so venal and spineless, that they have pitched the rights and birthrights of Britain’s Jews as they grovel after the votes of an Islamic community that has not accepted the core of British democracy: Respect for human rights and dignity. Donald Trump, much scorned in Europe, attacked these traits in American universities and elsewhere and has effectively discouraged anti-Semitism in the US. As all of Europe knows, that continent needs better leaders, in politics and elsewhere, to demand and preserve the concepts of human rights which were established or reasserted in Western Europe in World War II 80 years ago.