Mick Hartley

Jörg Luyken on the new antisemitism in Germany: not so much neo-Nazis, more Muslim immigrants.

These days, you don’t even have to be involved in activism to “get what you deserve.” Last month, a young Israeli couple were assaulted by two Arab men at a fast food restaurant in the Berlin neighbourhood of Neukölln after they were overheard speaking Hebrew. One of the men tried to hit the young woman over the head with a chair.

These sorts of attacks are examples of a new type of anti-Semitism that Germans are still uncomfortable talking about: hatred towards Jews in 2024 is more likely to come from Middle Eastern migrants than from neo-Nazis.

Officially, this isn’t true. In national police statistics, over 90 percent of anti-Semitic crime is still “assigned to the far-Right.” The problem is that the culprits for things like swastikas scrawled on a wall are hardly ever apprehended. And, when in doubt, police still tick the “far-Right” box in the crime report.

This practice has recently been criticised. A report commissioned by the Bundestag in 2017 found that the official statistics “distort the picture towards the Right” and “shouldn’t be mistaken for a representation of reality.”

Indeed, other research paints a very different picture.

A 2017 study conducted by the University of Bielefeld among victims of anti-Semitism found that 80 percent thought the culprit was a Muslim. Last year, a survey by the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung found that Muslims were over three times as likely as the rest of society to agreed that “Jews shouldn’t be surprised if they get a smack.”

That chimes with anecdotal evidence I’ve heard.

When I visited a Berlin synagogue shortly after the Hamas attacks in October, people I interviewed said that they avoid migrant neighbourhoods like Neukölln and Kreuzberg due to safety concerns.

One man said that ever fewer Jews send their children to state schools for fear that they will be bullied by their Muslim peers. That isn't just paranoia. There have been several cases in recent years of Jewish children being bullied out of school by Muslim classmates.

It would seem that this hatred is being stoked up in mosques.

Surely not!

A study released by the Bertelsmann Institute in December found that non-practising Muslims are about as anti-Semitic as the rest of society (i.e. one in five think Jews have “too much influence” in Germany). But, among Muslims who regularly attend mosque, half think that Jews have “too much influence” and close to 80 percent agree that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is “the same as how the Nazis treated the Jews.”

Given that hundreds of German mosques are run by imams sent by the Turkish government, that isn't the most surprising finding. After all, a couple of months back, the head of Ankara's religious authority described Israel as “a dagger” in the heart of the Muslim world.

Muslim attitudes to Jews vary though. Migrants from countries in southern Europe like Bosnia have broadly similar views of Jews to those in German society as a whole.

By the way, religion can work in both directions. Devout Christians are much less likely to be anti-Semitic than the rest of society, the Bertelsmann survey showed. “After centuries of hostility, churches in Germany have taken a critical look at their role in the Holocaust, something that has had an effect on their congregants," the report noted.

An interesting and telling contrast there between the two religions.