THE ECONOMIST: To fight anti-Semitism, first grasp where it comes from

The hatred looks different this time. There are no ghettos or pogroms; no European government espouses it.

In some ways the recent surge of anti-Semitism — including the stabbing of two Jewish men in London on April 29 — has a distinctly 21st-century character. Stand back, though, and the mindset of prejudice is horribly familiar.

So are the risks: for Jews across the diaspora, but not only for Jews.

The bloodshed in Golders Green, a hub of Britain’s small Jewish community, followed a spate of firebombings at Jewish sites in London. Last October an attack on a synagogue in Manchester killed two congregants.

Heartbreakingly, many British Jews for the first time feel obliged to downplay their Jewishness in public: slipping star-of-David pendants inside shirts, removing skullcaps en route to school or work.

These fears are not uniquely British. In March synagogues were targeted in Michigan and the Netherlands. In December, after a crescendo of hate crimes, 15 people were murdered at a Hanukkah party in Australia.

Rage over Gaza, especially among Islamists, is an important but oversimplified explanation.

Anti-Semitism did indeed spike in Europe and America with the atrocities in Israel on October 7 2023 and the ensuing war. Yet an explanation is not an excuse.

Everyone should be able to distinguish between an elderly man at a London bus stop and a Middle Eastern state.

Jews’ views on Israel (whatever they are) can never justify their persecution. No opinion should be punishable with violence.

Some in the West take a cold comfort in attributing the problem to immigrants.

In truth Islamism, virulent as it can be, is only one of the circles in what Sir Mark Rowley, Britain’s top policeman, calls a “ghastly Venn diagram of hate”.

Much of the left endorses a bogus moral framework in which Jews rank as colonisers and can never be victims.

In America the nativist right thinks Jewish globalists are plotting the country’s downfall — the deranged motive for previous shootings in Pennsylvania and California.

Hostile states use proxies to strike abroad: Iran’s hand has been detected in some recent attacks.

In all these ways, today’s anti-Semitism looks like a modern phenomenon — and you could add social media, which help recruit attackers and let neo-Nazis proselytise.

Looming beneath, though, is the age-old spectre of a sinister Jewish cabal, bent on power and subjugation.

It is there in the depictions of Benjamin Netanyahu and George Soros as puppetmasters. It resounds in the idea that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is the wellspring of the world’s ills.

Conspiracism is the common denominator; it is also a link between today’s prejudice and the hatreds in Nazi Germany or tsarist Russia.

Conspiracist thinking flourishes amid upheavals: the rise and fall of empires, ideological ruptures or, as now, populism and war.

With a sort of gravitational inevitability, it often defaults to the hoariest conspiracy theory, with its atavistic associations of Jews with greed and divided loyalties.

Caricatured as both rootless and sectarian, reactionary and subversive, they become catch-all avatars for disorienting change.

Understanding the deep roots of anti-Semitism is key to confronting it.

The already fortress-like security at Jewish institutions is rightly being reinforced.

Pro-Palestinian marches and the slogans chanted on them are under reconsideration, too.

Here politicians must balance the protesters’ right to free expression and the right of Jews to safety, which many feel is threatened by the marchers’ invective.

The Economist is sceptical of speech bans. Arresting grandmothers does nobody any good.

Laws cannot banish ingrained assumptions and archetypes: something bigger and harder is required.

Many people have learned to be more considerate when talking to and about other minorities; and when people talk differently, they can come to think differently. It is past time for Jews to be shown this respect.

Education can help. But above all, political and religious leaders of all stripes — and ordinary citizens — must call out anti-Semitism whenever they hear it. Too many have shamefully failed to do so.

The anguish of Jewish citizens ought to be motivation enough. But the echoes of history suggest another reason.

Jews are the victims of these assaults, but theirs is not the only future at stake.

Rather they are a crucial test of the freedom to live and worship as you wish.

When those rights are not upheld, the mob is ascendant, and the values of pluralism and tolerance that underpin free societies are in danger.