Antisemitic victimisation of Jews in Europe

The picture of self-reported antisemitic victimisation of Jews in Europe should be known considerably better than it is at present. Antisemitic harassment, shown in the figure below, includes antisemitic threatening comments in person, online and via email/texting, threats of violence and offensive gestures, targeting Jews as Jews. The fact that about a quarter of Jews in Europe are exposed to such harassment on an annual basis is not very well known in itself. This is unfortunate; the data are as sound as it gets. They originate in the European surveys of Jewish experiences of antisemitism and , unlike the official police-recorded statistics of incidents, or indeed statistics of incidents maintained by the Jewish security organisations, are unaffected by under-reporting. What raises the value of these data further is that here it is set in a comparative context: antisemitic victimisation alongside hate-motivated harassment of ethnic and immigrants minorities, also obtained from the surveys of minorities conducted in Europe.

Voila…Antisemitic harassment (28%) is comparable in volume to the levels experienced by the European Roma and the ‘NOAFR’, the North African immigrants and their descendants. It is higher in volume compared to the minorities originating in Asia (S/ASIA, eg India, Pakistan, 15%) and sub-Saharan Africa (SSAFR, 21%). Thus, with respect to hate-motivated harassment, Jews occupy a ‘respectable’ position among the European visible minorities. This is not all that needs to be known-the exact nature of harassment (online or not) should be unpacked to have a full picture- but this is something entirely unknown outside of the narrowest circles of the experts.

Antisemitic violence, the more serious form of victimisation, affects 2% of European Jews annually. In that respect, Jews are not different from other minorities, and European minorities are not too different from each other. Future surveys should chart the trend in all types of victimisation. When and if this happens, we will begin to understand whether or not antisemitism is on the rise. At present, we are still in the dark.