How bad is antisemitism in Europe? Amsterdam ‘pogrom’ follows rising hostility

By Lauren Markoe
November 8, 2024

Violent attacks on Israelis after a soccer match Thursday, in which bands of young men roved the streets of Amsterdam shouting “Jew” and “Free Palestine,” were widely denounced as antisemitic and described as a “pogrom,” evoking World War II memories and fears.

“We failed the Jewish community of the Netherlands during World War II, and last night we failed again,” King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands said to President Isaac Herzog in a Friday morning phone call.

Two-thirds of Europe’s Jews perished in the Holocaust. Eight decades later,  is Europe protecting its Jews? How much antisemitism are the continent’s Jewish communities — a fraction of their size before 1939 — suffering?

Even scholars who warn against conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism see a stark rise in antisemitic incidents across Europe in recent years, and especially since Oct. 7, when Hamas attacked Israel, prompting a war in which the Israel Defense Forces have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.

“It’s safe to say that the trend lines are bad,” said Warren Rosenblum, a history professor at Webster University in St. Louis who studies European antisemitism. “It’s safe to say that there’s been more genuine incidents of pure anti-Jewish rhetoric and anti-Jewish violence.”

The Anti-Defamation League released a report in September that showed a sharp increase in antisemitism globally, including in Europe. The ADL, which counts anti-Zionist incidents as antisemitic, found an 1,000% increase in France in the three months after Oct. 7, 2023 and a sixfold jump in Britain for the period between Oct. 7 and Oct. 31, 2023, compared to that same period the previous year.

And in the Netherlands, the ADL reported an 818% increase in the month following Oct. 7, compared to the average monthly total in the previous three years.

Many disagree with the ADL’s calculus, arguing that it counts too many incidents that reflect animus toward Israel policy and not hatred of Jews.

But that still leaves many incidents in the ADL’s list which seem more than just inflected with antisemitism. Among them: A Jewish man was stabbed in Paris by a man making antisemitic remarks. A mezuzah was torn off the doorpost of an apartment in Milan and a knife stuck into the wood in its place. In London, a woman at an anti-Israel protest shouted “Death to all Jews.”

Citing nations’ own data, Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, head of the American Jewish Committee’s European office, described an “explosion” of antisemitism across Europe in recent years, and “crazy numbers” since Oct. 7.

In France, home to the largest population of European Jews — 1,676 antisemitic acts were reported in 2023 compared to 436 the previous year, according to the French Interior Ministry and the Jewish Community Protection Service, a watchdog group.

The violence after the Amsterdam soccer match “could have probably taken place elsewhere,” she said.

Modern antisemitism in Europe

The uptick in European antisemitism started just after the turn of the century, after 9/11 and the Second Intifada, she said, and took its most violent form in a series of antisemitic murders in France in 2003, 2006 and again in 2012, when a gunman killed a rabbi and three young children at a Jewish school in Toulouse.

In France, the police tally antisemitic incidents. But Rodan-Benzaquen said the AJC’s own research shows that 80% of the nation’s Jews, who represent less than 1% of the population, decline to report incidents, in part for fear of reprisals.

She acknowledges that it’s difficult to tabulate antisemitic incidents across Europe. Some countries are better at collecting the data than others. They have adopted different definitions of antisemitism. And there is no one place where they pool their findings.

It’s a “challenge,” she said.

What can be said with certainty is that Europe’s Jews are experiencing more antisemitism than they did just a few years ago.

The European Agency for Fundamental Human Rights in July released a study of nearly 8,000 Jews across 13 countries in the European Union, surveyed from January to June 2023 — so before Oct. 7.  Eighty percent said antisemitism had increased over the past five years in their country.

And 96% said they had encountered antisemitism in the year before the survey, with 64% saying they experienced it ”‘all the time.”

“Faced with prejudice and hostility,” the survey’s authors wrote, “most feel unable to live openly Jewish lives.

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