Although Jews living in Europe today appear to be successful and secure, there is nevertheless an underlying sense of unease. Anti-Semitism is growing. A survey recently commissioned by the European Union’s Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) has found that Jews have experienced anti-Semitic harassment including physical attack or threat, and many have considered emigrating because they feel unsafe.
A menacing atmosphere also exists because of a general antipathy toward the State of Israel. Surveys show that as many as 40 percent of Europeans believe that Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians. There have also been moves in Europe to ban circumcision and kosher slaughter. Intense social pressures also exist, created by the rise of radical and often violent Islam of the kind that targeted Samuel Sandler’s son and grandchildren when an Islamist terrorist shot and killed them at a school in the southern city of Toulouse in France.
Jewish people find little comfort in assurances from politicians that anti-Semitism is “not present in the heart of society” or in “major political parties”. At the same time politicians acknowledge that a “frightening” degree of anti-Semitism is prevalent today in Europe, and promise to “fight against it with all the means at their disposal.”
Yet Jewish religious and cultural activities are everywhere on the rise. In Germany a measure of Jewish safety and security can be seen from the fact that synagogues have been built and restored in recent years. A European Centre for Judaism will soon be built under the auspices of the Consistoire (the French union of synagogues) and the French government. Jewish museums or Holocaust memorials are in evidence in Paris, Berlin and other European capitals, including a national Holocaust memorial and educational centre in Wannsee, Germany, the location of the notorious Nazi conference on the Final Solution.
Museums and memorials to the dead are one thing, but the Jews of today are living reminders of the Holocaust and the moral failure of Europe in the twentieth century. This is a burden of guilt that contemporary Europe finds uncomfortable. 4 Although about two-thirds of the Jews who survived the Holocaust left Europe for Israel, the United States, Australia and other countries, the remaining third were eager to resume their former life and reintegrate into society. To do so, they had to turn a blind eye to their country’s wartime behaviour.
But there were also good reasons to remain in post-war Europe. The Western Europe that emerged from World War II was a New Europe, full of optimism, promoting freedom and unity. Following the war, the United States stayed on in Europe and provided military security within Europe itself and against Soviet expansion. Through the Marshall Plan and similar mechanisms, the United States funded and sponsored rebuilding and development.
During this time the State of Israel enjoyed an extraordinary popularity in the Western world as a progressive and courageous country struggling in a backward and hostile region. The establishment of the Jewish state also helped Western Europeans cope with the otherwise uncomfortable memory of their role in the Holocaust. For the Jews of Europe, Israel became a symbol of their growing self-confidence after the tragedy and horror of World War II. This is not to say that anti-Semitism had completely disappeared from Western Europe, but Jews did begin to enjoy a period of increasing acceptance and participation in society.
All this began to change around the year 2000 as disillusionment with the New Europe took hold. Following the establishment of the European Union in the nineteen-nineties, the EU developed into a top-heavy, anti-democratic and chaotic body. The launching of the euro in 2002 failed to sustain prosperity, with the exception of Germany. After 2008 the common currency led to a series of national bankruptcies or near-bankruptcies in Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, France and, most spectacularly, in Greece.
Jews benefited from living in Europe as long as conditions ensured prosperity and progress. As conditions have deteriorated, so Europe’s Jews are increasingly suspect; conspiracy theories abound, and fertile ground for anti-Semitism has been created. As survivors or children of survivors, either of the Holocaust or of the near-complete expulsion of Jews from Islamic countries after 1948, Jews living in Europe know how a seemingly normal Jewish life could be destroyed overnight. This is why many believe that Jewish life in Europe might be at another turning point, and perhaps now it is time to leave. But there remains a better future for the Jewish people when Christ returns, for their God is faithful to His promises. No longer shall they be scattered among the nations, unable to find ease or rest (Deut 28:64-65), for there shall be a great ingathering of Jews to the land of Israel from all countries of the world: “Thus saith the Lord Yahweh; Now will I bring again the captivity of Jacob, and have mercy upon the whole house of Israel … Then shall they know that I am Yahweh their God, which caused them to be led into captivity among the heathen: but I have gathered them unto their own land, and have left none of them any more there” (Ezek 39:25, 28).