Jewish Perceptions of Antisemitism in the European Union, 2018: A New Structural Look

2.1 Historiographic Debates and Social Scientific Theory

Antisemitism in the most simplified caption is a negative perception of Jews. Perceptions of antisemitism imply that some kind of phenomenology exists exterior to those who report about it. Clearly, any person or group of persons tend to report their perceptions of that phenomenology through the lens of their own characteristics, experiences, and – admittedly – biases.

Before I turn to the analysis of contemporary Jewish perceptions of antisemitism in the EU, three cardinal questions deserve mention. The first concerns the paradox of definitions. The term antisemitism constitutes an oblique euphemism, rendered even more anachronistic in the form of the hyphenated anti-Semitism. Wilhelm Marr’s (1879) new lemma was directed with explicitly negative intentions against the target group. Paradoxically, a term that should have been disqualified because of its actively “against-them” meaning and purpose came to be used as a legitimate neutral term – no matter how worrying – in Jewish discourse. Regardless of the semantic, religious, or historical intentions of proposers and users, the actual concern was about an intentionally negative attitude against Jews. Especially in long-term perspective, Judeophobia would be more appropriate as the overarching term of reference (Judaken 2018). Keeping in mind that intention – and despite my own reservations about the word – in the present paper for simplicity, I shall regularly use the conventional unhyphenated form of antisemitism.

A second issue concerns whether or not Jewish historical and sociological experience possesses a fundamental coherence. The central analytic question here is whether or not Jewish history or Jewish sociology can be traced back to a set of shared principles and experiences. There admittedly existed significant cultural and structural variability across Jewish populations in various historical epochs, on different continents, and in varied regions. The Jews' prevalent status as a minority in society as a whole typically generated parallel positions of Jews versus the hegemonic others in different places. The theory that Jewish history and society were essentially explained by different local circumstances and did not share some fundamental commonality could lead to the conclusion there was not and there could not be one antisemitic syndrome. According to this point of view, each local antisemitic manifestation should be judged separately on the merits of the particular civilization within which it occurred. Taking this argument to the extreme logically leads to the conclusion that there could not be one Jewish Shoah; there had to be several according to places, each with different premises and outcomes. A better assessment should consider how interaction between certain historically transmitted and broadly shared Jewish norms, behaviors, and social-structural features, and the variable and non-shared patterns of societal environment could determine the final Jewish historical outcomes in each particular situation. This applies to the level of antisemitism and its perceptions.

A third question concerns the uniqueness or broader generalizability of antisemitism and its perceptions. Such debate in part reflects the different implications of a fundamentally deductive versus inductive approach chosen by an investigator to implement a research plan. The deductive, epistemological stance posits the existence of a general concept of evil, or of hate, which can then be articulated into several threads, one of them being hostility against Jews and its ultimate outcome – the Shoah. In this context, quite obviously, the Jewish case is no more than a particular manifestation of a much wider phenomenology relating racism, xenophobia, and all other possible forms of anti-group prejudice to the ultimate outcome of genocide. The explanatory onus is then transferred to the broader issue of the nature of evil or hatred. The attempt to explain world and human society in universalistic terms quite unavoidably leads toward normative theological exegesis or other immanent and apodictic types of explanation about the nature of humankind. The broader the explanatory approach, the more comprehensive but also the more unachievable the explanation without recurring to theological categories.

The symmetric stance – moving the analysis from below to above, from the particular to the general, from hypothesis formulation to its validation – is the one adopted in this paper, as usually practiced in the empirical social sciences. It involves accumulating knowledge from partial and imperfect pieces of evidence, whose summation may eventually lead to a clearer and more general picture. Hence, dealing with the particularistic aspects of a given topic not only does not represent a limit but actually constitutes a crucial component in the process of gaining a more comprehensive perception of that topic and assessing its extensive implications.

Facing the endeavor to improve the conceptualization of perceptions of antisemitism, several serious methodological problems emerge from the existing literature. I shortly review here four aspects of the broader connection between antisemitism and its perceptions among Jews.

Universalism versus Jewish particularism. Numerous thinkers – some of them Jewish – emphasized the universalistic character of the antisemitic phenomenology rather than its particularistic anti-Jewish orientation. Critical statements pertaining to historiographic discourse or social scientific theory maintained that antisemitism is not an analytical category (Engel 2009); understanding antisemitism is not specifically about the Jews (Finkelstein 2005); assessing genocide is not primarily about the Shoah (Meierhenrich 2014). These views advocated that detecting universal human behavior patterns and formulating ulterior research agendas was preferable over the assumedly parochial research horizons and policy-oriented goals of a more specific Jewish focus.

Intentionalism versus alternative explanations. A second issue was whether vilifying, damaging, or destroying the Jewish people, namely, during the years of World War II, required an intentional ideological design or rather was a manifestation of a more general causal thread. Influential contributions to the broader theoretical perspective were Hannah Arendt's attention to the banality of people and circumstances that could epitomize the historical event (Arendt 1963); Zygmunt Bauman's emphasis on modernity and the role of societal modernization (Bauman 1989); Christopher Browning's attention to bureaucracy and the role of an efficient body of civil servants (Browning 2004); and Timothy Snyder's bloodlands, stressing the inherently violence-prone nature of certain geocultural areas (Snyder 2010). Negative attitudes toward Jews were also explained as related to the broader need to define one's own collective identity in relation to denying some other's identity. Negative otherness attributed to the Jew might then be understood as a dialectic tool within broader national or meta-national discourse (Pinto 1996; Rein and Weisz 2011).

Jews as proxy. Another research thread (noted by Bokser Liwerant 2017) addressed Jews as the archetypal paradigm for developing general social or historiographic theories. In such cases, the Jewish collective was considered as a proxy for broader generalizations rather than as a real social phenomenon. Examples refer to the conceptualization of diasporas (Brubaker 2005; Cohen 1997), international migration, and transnationalism (Feldt 2016; Levitt and Waters 2002; Schiller Glick, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992), human capital creation (Coleman 1988), or the origins of totalitarianism (Arendt 1951). In this endeavor, little or no weight was given to whether the perceptions of Jews – the studied group – confirm and conform to the theoretical paradigm and why.

Jews as co-responsible. Some scholars stressed negative or problematic collective Jewish mental and behavioral patterns, thus partially blaming the Jews themselves for the incidence of antisemitism. Examples are Arnold Toynbee's characterization of the Jews as a fossil remnant of the Syriac society (Toynbee 1947); Benedetto Croce's critique of the Jewish pretension of chosenness and his blaming their refusal to assimilate into the Greco-Roman Christian mainstream as a cause for new potential persecutions (Finzi 2006, quoted in DellaPergola and Staetsky 2015); Sergio Romano's unfading memory, charging the Jews' refusal to forget the Shoah for slowing down Europe's progress and integration (Romano 1997); Enzo Traverso's end of modernity, lamenting the Jews' nationalist twist and the loss of their alleged leading role in modern Western intellectual progress (Traverso 2016); Ian Lustick's holocaustia, complaining that a narrow and obsessive focus on Shoah in Israel's Jewish society was the cause for the failure of peace negotiations with the Palestinians (Lustick 2017); or Shlomo Sand's invention of the Jewish people, arguing that the Jews' construction of a non-existent corporate past canceled the claim for Jewish national sovereignty (Sand 2009).

Attempts to interpret the problematic relationship between society and the Jews, and often also to interpret society at large through the Jewish collective, alluded to perceived contradictions such as Karl Marx's assertion about the Jews' cultural existence: “the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism“ (Marx 1844), as against Jean-Paul Sartre's opposite contention: “the Jew is a man regarded as Jewish by non-Jews: it is the gaze of others that makes the Jew, a Jew“ (Sartre 1946). Many Jews perceived historiographic and sociological interpretations such as those just reviewed, if not as justifications, at least as rationales for understanding (if not minimizing) antisemitism. Primo Levi once wrote: “understanding [explaining Shoah] is nearly like justifying“ (Levi 1976, p. 347). Jewish perceptions (as outlined later in this paper) may significantly contribute to elucidating theory and to generating a better assessment of the antisemitic phenomenology.

2.2 A Summary of Antisemitic Outlooks: Locked Modernizations

As noted, this study of Jewish perceptions of antisemitism in Europe relied on the socio-scientific paradigm of inductive analysis and probation and was based on information collected at the grass level from people representative of the broader Jewish population of the European Union. The methodology chosen was data collection from a large number of informants, selected as randomly as possible and queried about a fixed number of pre-coded questions of interest. Evidently, a survey based on mostly pre-established questions and answer options required a preliminary reflection about the nature of antisemitism and its perceptions by Jews, namely, what type of discursive or behavioral contents could be pertinent for inclusion in the survey instrument. The identification and selection of antisemitic terms of reference was not always self-evident, and one of the objectives of the research was to make it explicit and recognizable. Toward the 2012 FRA study, a preliminary review, classification, and selection of items was undertaken by a team of experts, and the same operation was repeated in advance of the 2018 FRA study, upon which the present paper is based (FRA 2013 and 2018a; Staetsky 2019a; Staetsky et al. 2013).

What, then, should be included in an enquiry about perceptions of antisemitism? There is no agreement about what the different possible conceptual facets of antisemitic offense are and whether they constitute one integrated complex or cluster – as maintained by some authors (e. g., Feldman 2018; Wistrich 2010) – or constitute separate topics each with its own logics and implications – as maintained by others (e. g. Engel 2009). As a preliminary answer, I would note that one nearly invariable perception of the antisemitic syndrome is the attribution of certain characteristics to the Jew as a collective ideotype and the incorporation of all the Jews within that ideotype. I would argue that a perception of antisemitism immediately arises once the words you or they/them are uttered in relation to a Jewish individual, population or community. Such uncritical attribution of collective characteristics prominently appears also among writers whose original intention was to advocate the case of greater justice for and incorporation of Jews into modern society (Cattaneo 1837; Grégoire 1788). More recent and systematic sociological investigation clearly shows how Jewish communities – though under a panoply of civilizational commonalities (Eisenstadt 1992) – feature intense individual variation nationally and locally. On the other hand, along with widespread double standards applied to Jews and others, the bank of anti-Jewish concepts and symmetrically their perception as antisemitic by the Jews themselves ceaselessly grew throughout historical, religious, political, and cultural change.

In historical perspective, the situation of the Jews was not comparable when they operated as minorities within an ancient, absolutist empire or theocracy, within a proto-national society, within an institutionalized national context, or as the majority of the population within a modern state – Israel – which also comprises non-Jewish minorities. Anti-Jewish attitudes often developed from characterizing specific Jewish individuals, then extending the characterization to an entire Jewish community, then (if applicable) toward broader national or transnational frameworks expressed by Jews. The emerging of ever new antisemitic conceptual foci and the existence of supporters of each of these foci across multiple and diverse Jewish existential contexts elicit a short review of societal transformations and their relationship to antisemitism. It is imperative, in this context, to distinguish between Jewish and non-Jewish perceptions.

Chronologically, the earliest reported notions of negative attitudes toward Jews came from ancient Jewish scriptures and therefore constituted Jewish perceptions of non-Jewish perceptions of Jews. Admittedly, anti-Jewish notions reported as coming from outside the group could be real or construed through the filter of Jewish imagination. Jewish sources did not provide the evidence whether or not the negative concepts and facts really existed. It is also immaterial whether or not the situation portrayed and its timing or societal context corresponded to historical reality. The notions reported in the Jewish narrative about negative non-Jewish perceptions of Jews are relevant because they single out those hostile judgments or sanctions that affected Jewish sensitivity in the past.

Whereas antisemitism may be considered a factor exogenous to the Jewish collective, its precondition and raison d'être from the beginning was the existence of some kind of corporate Jewish entity. This required consciousness of the existence of such an entity on both sides – the perpetrators and those who were the target of hostility. For the antisemitic act or expression to cause offense, damage, or uneasiness to Jews, the Jews themselves had to be aware of that offensive intention. This implied the existence of a corporate identification among the individuals targeted by the offense. Jewish perceptions of negative attitudes by others were therefore integrally intertwined with collective Jewish identity formation and awareness.

The first reference in ancient Jewish sources to a concept of people specifically addressing the sons of Israel – who much later would be known as the Hebrews and/or the Jews – was attributed to an external observer, Pharaoh (Exodus, 1: 9 [Hertz 1956]): a large number of individuals holding some shared property were said to constitute an entity defined as a people. The large size and quick pace of growth of such people aroused strategic concern. No particular values or behavioral characteristics were mentioned for the sons of Israel to constitute a people. Their common properties, therefore, amounted to shared ancestral origin, in addition, probably, to shared language and population size. Thus, the Jewish perception of a non-Jewish perception of too many Jews was synchronic and inherent in the onset of awareness of a Jewish peoplehood – as reported by Jewish sources.

Another relevant Jewish source is the Book of Esther, which portrayed the Jews in the Kingdom of Persia in the fifth century BCE. Here again, a Jewish narrator reported the already familiar syndrome of a political ruler who wanted to destroy the Jewish population (Esther 3:2–8). This followed a perceived intolerance of the Jews' alleged pride and contempt of the established order. Two additional significant elements for conceptualizing antisemitism included a perception of the Jewish people as a dispersed transnational entity – hence a foreign element within the constituted body of the dominant population and culture – and the purported Jewish refusal to reject their (religious) customs and adjust (assimilate) to the locally prevailing norms. Moreover, there was an explicit allusion to the Jews' unlimited intelligence and power (Esther 6:13).

More direct information about negative perceptions of Jews by non-Jews came from non-Jewish sources not mediated by the target group's own perceptions. New anti-Jewish motifs emerged throughout history in correlation with crucial breaking points in the endless flow of development and modernization. In Greco-Roman antiquity, one enlightening text was Cicero's “Pro Flacco,” delivered in Rome in the year 59 BCE (Stern 1976), which included comments about Jews such as: what a big crowd, how they stick together, how influential they are, they adhere to barbaric superstition but also send gold to Jerusalem, which was stopped for the welfare of the state. More than a century later, a text by the Roman historian Tacitus (Stern 1980) addressed the Jews' different customs, at once perverse and disgusting, the augmented wealth of the Jews, their internal honesty and compassion, as against hatred toward the rest of mankind, and their dwelling apart. I do not contend that Cicero or Tacitus, both leading members of the pagan pre-Christian intellectual elites, were antisemites in the modern sense. I would stress, however, the long-term historical resilience of certain leitmotifs of anti-Jewish polemics. Jewish monotheism and its elaborated legal code, but also the Jews' immigrant status had attracted Roman pagan attention and hostility, with particular emphasis on the Jews' separateness and cohesiveness, primitive customs, unreliability, and allegiance to Jerusalem.

A crucial factor in determining non-Jewish perceptions of Jews was the subsequent evolution of world religions. Christianity, especially after the fourth century, became the hegemonic faith of the Roman Empire and introduced the new and vitally important deicide paradigm – Jewish responsibility for the killing of Jesus – along with the blood libel and accusations of ritual murder and the myth of the wandering Jew (Yuval 2006). These premises, and their later elaborations in the different Catholic, Lutheran, other Protestant, and Russian and Greek Orthodox matrices, served as justifications for harsh anti-Jewish canonic doctrines and societal marginalization. Islam further simplified and diffused monotheism and introduced a dual anti-Jewish paradigm: on the one hand, respect for the Jews but condemnation for their non-compliance with their duties as the chosen people (The Qur'an, 2:62–64, 5:68–69); on the other hand, stigma for their intrinsic unfaithfulness and bestiality (The Qur'an, 8:55–60).

The modern rise of the paradigm of the Nation resulted in the formation of nation-states – either as the manifestation of God's will or as secular and antithetic to God. The bestowing of citizenship on the people brought about a quest for national homogeneity and allegiance. Most revealing in this transition was the attitude of the Catholic Church toward Jewish Conversos. The quest for blood purity implied the Jews' non-eligibility as members of the nation on grounds of foreignness and physical and intellectual pollution (Poliakov 2003, vol. 3). Acceptance of the converted could not be adjudicated only on theological, intellectual, or spiritual grounds but also involved a patently unattainable anthropological transformation (Poliakov 2003, vol. 2).

Cutting across national identities, the fight against national hegemonies dominated by powerful and exploitative economic elites brought about the new notion of social class homogeneity and solidarity. A new brand of anti-Jewish accusations focused on the Jews' alleged responsibility for economic exploitation and disruption and their selfishness (Poliakov 2003, vol. 3). The Protocols of the Elders of Zion brought about a new synthesis of theories of Jewish conspiracy and world dominance (Ben-Itto 2005; De Michelis 2004; Segel and Levy 1995).

More recent variations of the anti-Jewish syndrome included post-colonial and third-world anti-global hostility on grounds of whiteness (Mignolo 2009), and a neo-pagan mode of piety for the human body, related to opposition to male circumcision and advocacy of animal integrity in opposition to ritual animal slaughtering, which ultimately focused on Jews but not on other groups as deviant from enlightened social norms (Dencik and Marosi 2018).

Israel's independence in 1948 as a declaredly Jewish state – conceptually a filiation of nineteenth-century idealist nationalism but also an expression of long-held sentiments and dreams by diaspora Jews– engendered a new, hostile argumentative layer. Even more significantly than the independence of Israel, the June 1967 war with the occupation of Palestinian territories commenced a new anti-Israeli outlook, which also abundantly drew on several pre-existing anti-Jewish concepts. Two different camps advocated anti-Israeli discourse centered on contentions of illegitimacy as well as demonization on political grounds: anarchists and post-colonials rose against Jewish national sovereignty as a matter of principle theoretically applicable to other nationalisms as well, while Arab nationalists supported an alternative sovereignty instead of Israel's over the same territory. On the Jewish side, a new dilemma emerged facing the growingly visible discursive combination of philo-semitism with anti-Zionism, and of pro-Zionism with antisemitism (Consonni 2015).

In the historical sequence of anti-Jewish outlooks, the Shoah was paradoxically not innovative. The Shoah was not the fruit of a new anti-Jewish paradigm; it rather represented the attempt to bring pre-existing paradigms to final fruition. In contemporary antisemitic phenomenology, praising the genocidal fact as such and lamenting that not enough Jews had been killed, merely reproduced already mentioned themes. Shoah denial is not innovative either and echoes several of the previously mentioned antisemitic slogans, such as Jewish myth creation and economic exploitation.

Summing up, the multiple ideological foundations of antisemitism did and do include numerous potential strands but also contradictions. These, in turn, profoundly shaped Jewish perceptions of antisemitism. Capital elements of the perceived antisemitic repertoire included ancient Middle-Eastern views of Jews as too numerous, not subservient, dispersed, separate, keeping to their customs, intelligent, and strategically powerful; the pagans' outlook – a large crowd, barbarian customs, sticking together, foreignness, and allegiance to Jerusalem; the Christian deicide and ritual murder; the Islamic infidelity and bestiality; the originally Catholic and later nationalist and fascist Right's view of the nation's contamination; the Marxist and anarchist Left's social-class exploitation; the Protocols' conspiracy; the physical and cultural Nazi anthropologists and philosophers' racial inferiority, stressing the Jew as a physical and moral degenerate, entailing a component of non-whiteness; and the Liberals' – their unwillingness to assimilate – basically come back full circle to the early pagan contention. Christians and Muslims viewed the Jew as the enemy, but also as possible neophyte, hence a subjugated subject. Political antisemitisms from the Right and from the Left stigmatized the Jew for opposed, singularly specular reasons. For ancient pagans and modern Liberals, the main concern was and remains assimilation of the Jews. Opposition – primarily Islamic but not only – to the modern State of Israel brought about a synthesis of two different paradigms: against the Jews, and against a Jewish state.

Why is this repetition of essentially known concepts and circumstances relevant here? First, it is important to realize the continuous and cumulative build-up and growing complexity of the antisemitic syndrome. Secondly, one may posit that each turning point and steep change on the uninterrupted historical-societal itinerary generated a new perspective on Jews, hence a new format of antisemitism, in addition to the existing ones. Turning to the contemporary scene, different groups of people – in our optics here, different types of perpetrators – seemingly stopped and fixed their negative perceptions of Jews at one or another junction of the long-term historical continuum. In a singular division of labor, each type of perpetrator picked up and adopted one or another of the once innovative, later societally embedded concepts as their own chosen term of reference. As history proceeded, new strata of antisemitic prejudice continuously built upon the pre-existing ones (Bokser Liwerant 2019). The contemporary antisemitism typology thus comprises a coalescence of several modes of locked modernizations. Each brand of antisemitic outlook is anchored in history and – alone or in combination with others – represents the elective, self-sufficient, and self-perpetuating source of inspiration for different contemporary perpetrators.

Ultimately, relatively few resilient, aggressive, and self-perpetuating concepts populated the antisemitic repertoire, each element being self-sufficient, but also recombining with others to create a lethal blend. The hostile Jewish stereotypes just listed offered a solid blueprint for formulating a contemporary survey questionnaire about perceptions of antisemitism. Such a complex repository of antisemitic slogans and of their perceptions by Jews calls for cogent classification, data collection, processing, and analysis of empirical data. Some of the results will be reviewed below.

2.3 European Jewish Perceptions of Antisemitism in Perspective

Today, Europe comprises an estimated core Jewish population above 1.3 million – larger than four EU member countries: Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus, and Estonia. European Jews are part of a large, transnational network, much of which is located on other continents such as North America and Israel. Jews born in Europe or the descendants of Jews born in Europe are aware and even proud of their cultural origins, but only a minority of all contemporary Jews of European origin actually live on the European continent (DellaPergola 2019). In the modern era, the pendulum of demographic growth or decline repeatedly oscillated. After the Shoah and World War II, one important factor was the liquidation of European colonialism and the ensuing “repatriation“ of Jews to the European homelands of former colonies – primarily to France but also to several other countries. Large numbers of Jewish immigrants came from North Africa and the Middle East, areas that previously had functioned as protected or self-sufficient niches although relatively less socioeconomically developed. Many more arrived from Eastern Europe before, during, and after the Soviet era. Europe was perceived among the world's more developed areas. But Europe also was the source of significant Jewish emigration, prompted among other determinants by perceptions of growing antisemitism and fears of terrorism.

Contemporary perceptions of antisemitism in the European Union, in fact, reflected the European way to antisemitism and could not be assessed without recalling earlier stages and experiences related to the longue dureé of antisemitism on the European continent. Jews have been present in Europe since antiquity, but the ineludible fact is that from the beginning, they had arrived from some extra-European location. Jews were immediately perceived as strangers when they entered societies that pre-existed and functioned based on already established systems of mores and institutions. The foundational ideotypes and beliefs and the essential components of Jewish corporate life were imported from the Middle East, with Jerusalem at its ideal center. Large sectors of the ancestors of contemporary European populations, indeed, came from other continents, and such inflow, intermingling, conflict, and assimilation of populations and cultures was a constant feature in European social and intellectual history.

Jews' extended exposure to European civilizations enabled long periods of pacific and successful integration. Absorption by Jews of European mores and ideas generated deeply embedded national and transnational modes of Jewish ritual, thought, and institutional formation. Such forms of adaptation, change, and growth crucially influenced other branches of world Jewry, primarily through circulation of greatly diverse Jewish cultural patterns, political ideas, and personal skills within the European continent, then in the Americas, and in other countries overseas, and also – through the boomerang of European colonization – rejoining the older Jewish presence in the Middle East.

Judeophobia and antisemitism were not a European invention but thrived and diversified in Europe. In Europe, a long tradition of ethnic cleansing was applied to Jews on many occasions in the form of massive expulsions, ghettoization, attempted mass conversion, and mass murder. The European colonization of extra-European continents often brought about the ethnic cleansing of civilizations that pre-existed there. The sequence of expulsions of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula was intended to be the final act of the Jewish presence in Spain and Portugal and occurred simultaneously with the initial stages of Europe's expansion and subsequent colonization of the geocultural and geopolitical space that was to become the Caribbean and Latin America. An all-encompassing concept of hegemonic purity and homogeneity rooted in Europe was exported overseas and coherently applied to local civilizations, after it had been abundantly tested on the skin of European Jews. Europe was the source and prime exporter of many leading ingredients of hatred and discrimination – as well as of the tools needed for their implementation. These ranged from the wooden and rusty metal torture devices now hosted in Cordoba's Museum of the Inquisition – to more sophisticated, symbolic, subliminal, and subversive mechanisms of social inclusion and exclusion.

Each of the component nations of the European palimpsest contributed certain original turning points in the course of the history of antisemitism. Some of the most valued tenets of the alleged superiority of the European over other civilizations included the quality of its (Roman inspired) juridical system, time punctuality, efficient allocation of power to achieve targets, postponed gratification, and putative rationality (Szakolczai 2016; ). The Shoah provided a glaring demonstration of how the implementation of those supposedly positive traits, when put in the service of unrestrained ideology could generate a civilizational regression of planetary significance.

For sure, in the assessment of antisemitic perceptions, the question of European continental and national particularism should be given adequate attention. Jewish perceptional differences that still cut across European societies are worth of consideration and study. The ensuing analysis will elucidate unique national patterns of Jewish perceptions of antisemitism in the framework of broader transnational patterns. The particular, however, should eventually be placed within a holistic approach to antisemitism and its meanings.

3.1 Recent Approaches to the Study of Antisemitism

The study of contemporary antisemitism utilizing the social sciences approach should first of all specify the main investigative strategies pursued, the sources of available data, the respective limitations, and the principal interpretative implications.

The first stage has entailed assembling and collating inventories of events rated as antisemitic. Such events may include violence or harassment against a specific person as a Jew, against other Jewish persons, Jewish properties, or Jewish institutions. Such events may be reported or denounced by Jews and/or by others. Such databases were developed by community and academic-oriented Jewish organizations, as well as by general public organizations (FRA 2018b; Kantor 2018; Knobel 2013; OSCE-ODIHR 2016). The advantage of these types of documentation is that they represent factual events that really happened. Examining the variation of their frequency diachronically and spatially enables the creation of a historical series of data, which, in turn, may constitute the background for local and international comparisons between simultaneous fluctuations in antisemitism and in other social aspects. The limit of this method is primarily its dependency on people's willingness and ability to report such events. Research evidence (including FRA 2013 and FRA 2018a) indicates that reporting is extremely reticent and imperfect, leading to gross underreporting of such events. In addition, clearly, only a small minority of individuals within a given population are involved in explicit acts of harassment, profanation, and violence. Antisemitism comprises a much wider range of actions and written or verbal expressions apt to touch upon Jewish sensitivities. The possible ratio stands at several thousand documented acts of antisemitic acts worldwide per year, versus tens or hundreds of millions of people holding and/or expressing antisemitic views during the same year.

A second approach explored the frequency and nature of anti-Jewish attitudes among the total population (ADL 2014; ADL 2015). In the largest such study on record, in 2013, the Anti-Defamation League approached 500 individuals in each of 102 countries, for a total of over 50,000 respondents (ADL 2014). Respondents were asked to express agreement or disagreement with a list of anti-Jewish prejudices. Those who agreed with six or more statements were included in an index of antisemitism. The study did not investigate actual discrimination enacted against Jews. This, incidentally, might have been difficult or even impossible, considering that in many countries the Jewish population is very small and many or most people do not know personally any Jew. There may be doubts about the meaning of such a definition and measuring procedure of antisemitism, exclusively circumscribed to the cognitive dimension, but one cannot minimize the usefulness of the ADL study, which for the first time provided some comparable measure of the extent of antisemitism in 102 countries. Another serious caveat concerns the description of society as a rigid dichotomy of antisemites and not-antisemites. It is actually clearly demonstrable that antisemitic prejudices and attitudes are diffused gradually and flexibly across populations (DellaPergola 2015; Staetsky 2017), and this should be reflected in data analysis.

An American organization, the Pew Research Center, repeatedly investigated the attitudes toward Jews of representative samples of the total population in several countries, including Europe (Pew Research Center 2016/16 and 2017), as did, among others, the American Jewish Committee (e. g., Jodice 1991; Karmasin 1992) and the CNN broadcasting network (Greene 2018). A recent and quantitatively more impressive research framework is represented by the several Eurobarometer surveys of perceptions of the existence of antisemitism among general population samples in each of the 28 member countries of the European Union (e. g., European Commission 2019). These surveys also explored the extent of knowledge about Jews and Judaism in the respective countries.

A third type of approach has focused on perceptions of antisemitism by the Jews themselves. Major examples were the two large surveys of Jewish populations undertaken by the FRA in 2012 among Jews in nine EU countries (FRA 2013) and in 2018 among Jews in 13 countries (FRA 2018a). Results of the 2018 study (see more detailed discussion below) constitute the principal basis of the present paper. The basic demographic profiles of those included in the surveys were shown broadly to correspond to data on Jews known from other independent sources, which confirmed the reliability of the samples. The two studies, in addition to providing detailed evidence about Jewish perceptions and experiences with antisemitism, collected data on the sociodemographic and Jewish identification profiles of respondents.

All the different cross-sectional public opinion studies mentioned so far – whether aimed at the total population or at Jews only – attempted to cover a wide range of perceptions and experiences related to antisemitism. In addition to general issues of sampling quality and errors, their validity is limited to the specific points in time when they were carried out. Repeated observations – as in the case of the 2012 and 2018 FRA surveys – allowed the construction of rough time-series and the assessment of ongoing trends. Longitudinal surveys, involving compilation of repeated observations of the same individuals over different points in time, would produce a better sense of changing perceptions among the same individuals – hence a more accurate picture of the evolution of perceptions over time. To the best of my knowledge, however, such a survey design has not yet been tested in the field of antisemitism studies.

A fourth method of investigation has focused on the contents of discourse, mostly about Jews and/or about Israel. This important field, which so far has been explored insufficiently, consists of the analysis of openly or latently antisemitic verbal and textual contents expressed in the conventional printed (e. g., Partington 2012) and electronic media, in the web and in the fast-developing social media. In exploratory work undertaken so far, selected key words related to Jews, Judaism, and other general topics were suggested to samples of respondents and the associations emerging in relation to those words were verified (Guetta 2013; Petrenko and Mitina 1997; Russian Jewish Congress – Levada Center 2018b). More systematically, it is possible to examine various potential channels of diffusion of anti-Jewish prejudices, such as in large bulks of electronic mails, the display of internet sites, exchanges on Facebook networks, and the like (Schwarz-Friesel and Reinharz 2017). Carefully selected semantic associations among words can result in more powerful and lasting effects on larger audiences than mere acts of violence accomplished in specific locations. Whereas the latter are easy to detect and report, the former may be more elusive, as they require devoting substantial time to reading and listening, careful coding of contents, as well as a wide command of historical, philosophical, and literary sources, and meticulous attention to nuances.

Studies incorporating broad sets of external indicators distributed along a defined time span have been infrequent although they could provide the explanatory context to specifically antisemitic attitudes and behaviors that are observed over the same time span – for example, we may note the attempt to find a correlation between antisemitic manifestations and the fluctuations of the economic conjuncture (Epstein 1993); the military situation in the Middle East (Eddy 2014); or Muslim immigration to Europe (Feldman and Gidley 2018). For sure, further research needs to be undertaken in order to ascertain whether observed and perceived expressions of antisemitism reflect contingent situations related to occurrences in specific times and places or rather reflect a manifest or latent feature inherent in society and scarcely sensitive to changing circumstances.

3.2 The FRA 2018 Study

This paper develops a new analysis of the data collected in the second survey on Jewish people's experiences and perceptions of hate crime, discrimination, and antisemitism, undertaken in 2018 at the initiative of the European Union's Agency for Fundamental Rights, FRA. The main results were published in FRA (2018a). I re-elaborated the original data taking advantage of Similarity Structure Analysis (SSA), a technique of data processing based on Facet Theory (see below).

The FRA 2018 survey built strongly on the experience and methodology developed for the 2012 FRA survey on discrimination and hate crime against Jews, which covered nine EU Member States (France, the UK, Germany, Hungary, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Latvia, and Romania. Data for the latter country were omitted in the final analysis because they were of poor quality). The conceptual infrastructure was provided for the most part by an academic advisory committee that included several leading specialists on issues of contemporary European Jewry convened in 2012 by the Jewish Policy Research (JPR) Institute, JPR, in London. FRA was mainly interested in assessing the practical instances of physical aggression and harassment and the extent of Jewish responses to them, as well as the awareness of existing laws aimed at protecting the Jewish community. These aspects are not dealt with in detail in the present study, which mainly focuses on perceptions and experiences of antisemitism contents, transmission channels, and perpetrators. Such topics were discussed and defined by the advisory committee reflecting the themes covered in the previous section of this paper.

The 2012 FRA survey generated a crop of research papers, which examined the issues both in the integrated perspective of the eight countries covered, and in the local framework of specific country reports. The latter related to the United Kingdom (Staetsky and Boyd 2014), Italy (DellaPergola and Staetsky 2015), Belgium (Ben-Rafael 2014), France (Cohen 2012 and 2013), Sweden (Dencik and Marosi 2017), Germany (Glöckner 2013), Hungary (Kovács 2013a), and Latvia (Kovács 2013b).

In 2017, a stakeholders' consultation was carried out in Vienna at the initiative of the FRA to elaborate the feasibility plan of a new study to be conducted in 2018 in 13 countries – Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. An expanded academic committee reflecting the larger number of participating countries advised on the design and implementation of this survey. The FRA's 2018 survey collected data from 16,395 self-identified Jewish respondents (age 16 or over) in 12 EU Member States (the data for Latvia were omitted from the final analysis because of poor quality). Countries were selected for the study primarily because of their relatively larger Jewish population size but also in view of their locations in the different regions of the continent: north, south, east, and west. The 12 EU countries covered correspond to 97% of the EU core Jewish population, estimated at above one million in 2018 (DellaPergola 2019).

In preparation for the 2018 survey, the 2012 survey questionnaire was subjected to a review that resulted in changes in some of the questions. Efforts to reduce the survey length were taken, with a view to minimizing the respondent burden. This included reviewing possible questions for deletion and reducing the number of items and answer categories in individual questions. Some questions were deleted; others were streamlined, rephrased or repositioned in the questionnaire to improve the flow when answering the questions. The questionnaire was also revised to establish a design compatible across most common, latest operating systems (such as Microsoft Windows, Apple's iOS, Linux) and that also could work on different types of devices, including desktop and laptop computers, tablets, and smartphones that could be used for completing the survey. Questionnaire revisions aimed at retaining comparability with the 2012 survey to the extent possible. The 2018 survey questionnaire is available in a separate report (FRA 2018c).

The survey collected data through an open online survey, which was open for respondents to complete during seven weeks in May-June 2018. Eligible participants were all those self-defining as Jews, aged 16 or over, and resident in one of the survey countries. The questionnaire was administered online and could be accessed via an open web link that was publicized on the FRA website, through extensive advertisement in Jewish organizations, Jewish media outlets, and social networks. People who had connected with the survey were asked to snowball to acquaintances who might not have been aware of it. Some doubts remain whether the most marginal and unconnected layers of the Jewish public actually had or wanted to have access to the survey instrument. Information collected about the patterns of affiliation of respondents provided a reasonable sense of confidence that the survey did reach the peripheral fringes of the community (Staetsky 2019a). In some cases, participation of Jews belonging to the Haredi sectors of the Jewish community may have been lower than average.

A consortium of Ipsos MORI and the Institute for JPR, both based in the United Kingdom, managed the survey data collection under the administrative supervision of FRA staff. National research teams of academic experts and local researcher and community liaison points in each survey country supported the survey implementation.

JPR collected information on the size and composition of the Jewish population in each country and on Jewish community structures in the European countries involved, identified ways to raise awareness about the survey among Jews in the selected countries, and implemented a capillary communication strategy. Ipsos MORI ensured the technical set-up of the survey, including the translation of all survey materials, development of the survey website, and compliance with the standards of data security, privacy, and confidentiality.

Throughout data collection, responses were monitored using the online monitoring tool provided by Ipsos. This enabled monitoring of response levels on a daily basis and enabled observing the impact of particular communications campaigns by different organizations across the survey countries and checking the distributions of responses by age, sex, geography, and Jewish affiliation to assess how the communications campaigns were reaching difference segments of the target population. Because of the voluntary and self-selected nature of respondents, the sample cannot be considered strictly representative as would be a random probabilistic sample of the target population. Comparisons between the survey results and Jewish population distributions by age, sex, and major geographical region available from other national and Jewish community sources showed relatively modest amounts of bias. For the purpose of population characteristics description, the sample can be weighted according to the distributions in those other sources. As the present paper is concerned with relationships between variables rather than with population profiles, unweighted data were used here.

The data collection outcomes confirmed the experience of similar online surveys that the launching day is critical. In this case, over 4,000 responses were obtained on the first day alone, constituting nearly a quarter of the total sample. Following the processes undertaken to assess the quality of the data and cleaning of the dataset, the final dataset included 16,395 completed questionnaires across the 12 valid survey countries, excluding Latvia. The average time for survey completion was 33 min, and the median duration was 27 min.

The response rate in 2018 was significantly higher than in 2012 (see Appendix Table). In the seven countries where data can be compared for both dates, the number of valid respondents increased from 5,663 in 2012 to 13,083 in 2018, an increase of 131% or more than double. The number of respondents increased especially in France (+233%), the UK (+222%), Germany (+103%), Belgium (+79%), and Sweden (+47%). This improved coverage of the Jewish population testifies to considerably more efficient advertising of the survey, enhanced access to the web, and also probably greater awareness of and interest in the topic investigated.

3.3 Perceptions of Antisemitism Inside and Outside the Jewish Community

One important research question emerging from the various sources of data reviewed so far is whether the existence of antisemitism is perceived to an equal extent by those who are its target and by the many more around them who constitute the majority of population. The correlation that may exist between internal and external perceptions of antisemitism at the country level can be judged by comparing different studies that have addressed, respectively, Jewish or general population samples in the same places and at more or less the same time. Several such studies undertaken in recent years allow for such comparisons.

In Figure 1, I compared the ADL data for 2013 and the FRA data for 2018 for the 12 countries included in the latter study. It is important to note that the ADL study of total populations concerned primarily the cognitive perceptions of antisemitism, whereas the FRA study of Jewish populations also covered its experiential aspects. The FRA data reported in Figure 1, however, relate to a cognitive question about the concern with antisemitism as a societal issue in the country of residence; thus making it comparable with the ADL data. In the figure, the horizontal axis measures the diffusion of antisemitic prejudice in society at large – assumed here as the explanatory variable – and the vertical axis measures the Jewish perception of the phenomenon – assumed here as the dependent variable.

Figure 1:

Comparing Measures of Antisemitism in 12 EU Countries – FRA 2018 Percentage Assessing Antisemitism as a Very Serious or fairly Serious Issue in Society vs. ADL 2013 Percentage of Antisemitic Respondents.

Key to Countries: AT: Austria; BE: Belgium; DE: Germany; DK: Denmark; ES: Spain; FR: France; HU: Hungary; IT: Italy; NE: The Netherlands; PL: Poland; SE: Sweden; UK: United Kingdom.

In the ADL study, the proportion of the total population rated as antisemitic ranged between a low of 4% in Sweden and a high of 45% in Poland, while among Jews in the FRA study, perceptions of antisemitism as an important issue in society ranged between a low of 56% in Denmark and a high of 95% in France. It thus clearly demonstrates how much more sensitive Jews are than others when assessing antisemitism and the environment within which it develops. The general ranking of countries along the two measures, however, was overall very consistent, showing a 52% positive correlation. The determination quotient (R² = 0.2728, or 27%) indicates how much of the variance in perceptions by Jews (the variable on the vertical axis) is statistically explained by attitudes among the general public (the variable on the horizontal axis). If the apparent outlier case of Denmark is omitted, the variance explained is somewhat reduced to 20%. The result is statistically significant although not very powerful. The data in Figure 1 suggest quite clear regional differences between northern, western, and eastern European countries. Regional differences within the EU were clearer from the ADL than from the FRA survey data.

A similar comparison between the same ADL data and the 2012 FRA data (based on eight countries) resulted in a much higher correlation and explained variance: 54%. The 6-year gap between the two FRA surveys may account for part of the inconsistency. Clearly, the sensitivity of Jews to perceived antisemitism is higher than on average among the surrounding population. In a reported context where perceptions of antisemitism were increasing rapidly, however, patterns of change in each country seem to have gone in somewhat different directions, thus reducing the strength of the immediate relationship between perceptions among the general population and within the Jewish community.

The 2018 FRA study of Jewish perceptions of antisemitism and the European Council's 2018 Eurobarometer study of antisemitism perceptions among society at large provide similar comparisons. The Eurobarometer survey was undertaken in all 28 member countries of the European Union in 2018. Interestingly, the 12 countries investigated in the nearly simultaneous FRA survey happened to be those that registered the highest perceptions of antisemitism among the Barometer 28, with the sole exception of Spain. In this case, the comparison can be improved by distinguishing in both surveys those who perceive antisemitism as a very important or very serious problem and those who view it only as a fairly important or fairly serious problem. Looking first at those viewing antisemitism as a very serious issue (Figure 2), their incidence according to the Eurobarometer ranged between a low of less than 10% in Poland, Spain, Hungary, and Denmark, and a high of over 35% in Sweden. According to the FRA survey, the range was between 15% in Denmark and 65% in France. Jewish perceptions again appeared significantly higher than total perceptions. Statistically, country variance across the Eurobarometer respondents explained 17.5% of the country variance among FRA respondents. This coefficient of determination is considerably lower than that observed on the basis of the ADL study.

Figure 2:

Comparing Measures of Antisemitism in 12 EU Countries: “Antisemitism is a Very Serious Problem in Your Country.” Percentages – FRA 2018 vs. Eurobarometer 2018.

Key to Countries: AT: Austria; BE: Belgium; DE: Germany; DK: Denmark; ES: Spain; FR: France; HU: Hungary; IT: Italy; NE: The Netherlands; PL: Poland; SE: Sweden; UK: United Kingdom.

The relationship between general and Jewish perceptions was even weaker with reference to the perception of antisemitism as the aggregate of a very serious or fairly serious issue (Figure 3). The respective percent frequencies increased from a low of 20% in Spain and a high of 80% in Sweden according to the Eurobarometer, and from a low of 55% in Denmark to a high of 95% in France according to the FRA. With the possible exceptions of Denmark and Spain, the range of intercountry variation in acknowledging the seriousness of the antisemitism threat in society was somewhat reduced. Consequently, the amount of country variance in Jewish perceptions explained by country variance in general perceptions was a modest 10.4%.

Figure 3:

Comparing Measures of Antisemitism in 12 EU Countries: “Antisemitism is Very Serious or Fairly Serious Problem in Your Country.” Percentages – FRA 2018 vs. Eurobarometer 2018.

Key to Countries: AT: Austria; BE: Belgium; DE: Germany; DK: Denmark; ES: Spain; FR: France; HU: Hungary; IT: Italy; NE: The Netherlands; PL: Poland; SE: Sweden; UK: United Kingdom.

Looking at these correlations, it is remarkable how Poland and Sweden occupied diametrically opposed positions in the ADL study seen above, versus the Eurobarometer study. The frequencies for Spain and Hungary were among the higher among the countries examined according to the ADL criteria and among the lower according to the Eurobarometer, although the percentages themselves were not that different. Possibly, the disparity partially is a reflection of the five-year lag between these two surveys of general public opinion, and their different methodologies. Part probably depended on the different respondents' evaluation of antisemitism as a phenomenon permeating the society of the respective countries (Eurobarometer), as against the personal attitudes by respondents with regard to Jews (ADL).

This observation prompted me to compare the findings of the ADL and Eurobarometer studies, both aimed at the total population, but with significantly different formulations of the dependent variable being investigated. As already noted, in the case of Eurobarometer, it was the assessed significance of antisemitism in society; in the case of the ADL, it was the assessed percentage of people with antisemitic views. The results are presented in Figure 4.

Figure 4:

Comparing Measures of Antisemitism in 12 EU Countries – Eurobarometer 2018 Percentage Assessing Antisemitism as a Very Serious or Fairly Serious Issue in Society vs. ADL 2013 Percentage of Antisemitic Respondents.

Key to Countries: AT: Austria; BE: Belgium; DE: Germany; DK: Denmark; ES: Spain; FR: France; HU: Hungary; IT: Italy; NE: The Netherlands; PL: Poland; SE: Sweden; UK: United Kingdom.

An extraordinary inverse relationship emerged between the findings of the two surveys, with an amount of explained variance of 18.5%, which if not exceptionally high, was nevertheless significant. These data are enlightening because they reveal the possible contraposition between personally harboring antisemitic prejudices, and perceiving antisemitism as a problem in society. Moreover, once again a definite clustering of European countries into regional areas with distinct perceptional patterns emerges: the low range of the ADL measure, tending to be higher on the Eurobarometer measure, included northern countries such as Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom; the higher of the ADL range combined with the lower on the Eurobarometer range included countries of the former Soviet bloc area such as Poland and Hungary; the intermediate range included western countries such as France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, and Italy; Spain was in an outlier position, the lowest by Eurobarometer and among the higher by the ADL.

In any case, the amount of coherence that appeared to exist between the two general studies (ADL and Eurobarometer) and the FRA specifically Jewish study, while not absolute, consistently showed more acute and sensitive perceptions of antisemitism among Jews than among the general public. This may reflect a situation in which the perception of antisemitism has become over time an integral part of the patterns of Jewish identification – as will be argued later in this paper.

3.4 Cognitive, Experiential and Affective Domains

Another important question concerns the definition of the relevant boundaries of interest when researching perceptions of antisemitism. As is well known from general research in the field of social psychology, the whole gamut of human attitudes and perceptions can be classified into three main domains: cognitive/intellectual, behavioral/experiential/ instrumental, and affective/emotional (Tooby and Cosmides 1992). Likewise, in the study of antisemitism, we may imagine the total attitudinal and perceptional space of an individual or of a collective of individuals as a bi-dimensional shape. Figure 5 schematically exemplifies the expected partition of that space among those three main perceptional domains. In a multiple variable analysis aimed at better understanding perceptions and experiences of antisemitism, each of the variables included should ideally fall within any of the three delineated domains. This expectation would be true if we assume that the questions or indicators actually included in a given study succeeded in covering the entire human perceptional space and its domains.

Figure 5:

Illustrative Distribution of Perceptions of Antisemitism by Main Domains.

Most historical and social scientific studies about antisemitism have stressed either a cognitive or a behavioral dimension. Considerable existing information inappropriately confounds these two aspects, whose empirical incidence is actually widely different: for the most part, cognition of antisemitism is more diffused than actual experience of it. Surprisingly, the third domain, the affective-emotional, has often been neglected in serious social scientific discourse. The affective/emotional aspect has been kept at the margins or basically ignored in studies of antisemitism, with the exception of specialized clinical-psychological studies directly focused on those aspects (e. g., Helmreich 1996; Weinfeld, Sigal, and Eaton 1981). And yet, I argue, it is crucially important to answer the question: How does antisemitism affect a person's emotional and affective perceptions? For example, does antisemitism generate among Jews anxiety, anger, fear, aggressiveness, passivity, activism, loneliness, solidarity, creativity, or other feelings? Does it strengthen or weaken previously held Jewish religious or ethnic identities? Does it strengthen or weaken Jewish community relations and networks? Does it strengthen or weaken empathy, solidarity, and national identification with the country of residence of affected Jews? This still appears to be an uncharted research area.

Each of the above-mentioned contexts requires different analytic tools and probably also different explanatory frameworks. To exemplify some of the emerging differences, I show in Table 1 a short synthesis and comparison between variables related to antisemitism as investigated at the cognitive and at the experiential level in the 2018 FRA survey of Jews in 12 EU countries. The data compare the highest frequencies reported among the different perceptional options that were offered to respondents within each selected area of interest.

In each instance chosen, the reported frequencies were higher at the cognitive level than at the experiential level. This accents the difference between awareness or belief that a given expression or behavior is antisemitic and actually hearing that expression or experiencing that behavior. Table 1 in particular synthetizes selected contents that Jews may perceive as offensive concerning alleged characteristics of the Jews themselves, the Holocaust, or the State of Israel. The frequency ranking of three major areas of contents appears to be reversed in the experiential data versus the cognitive data. The table also compares cognitive and experiential frequencies regarding the most used channels of transmission of such negative contents and frequencies of discrimination possibly (cognitive) versus actually (experiential) suffered.

These examples indicate that it is imperative carefully to specify the meaning of the data presented in any given analysis of the empirical evidence; unfortunately, this has not been a firm rule in past and ongoing research about antisemitism. In the present study, reflecting the database available and its limits, attention was devoted to the profile of and differences between cognitive and experiential domains. Unfortunately, relevant aspects in the affective domain were not investigated in the FRA study, and therefore their incidence cannot be compared with that of the other domains. The emerging evidence strongly suggests that future research on antisemitism should take into consideration all possible domains of the human perceptional sphere.

3.5 Similarity Structure Analysis – SSA

In the case of data analysis that focuses on quantitative analysis, the dominant mode in the literature has been the presentation of simple tabulations of data frequencies. Plain description or simple juxtaposition of results, beyond a first impression, does not usually generate more complex insights about theories or processes that would require the simultaneous processing of vastly larger quantities of information. A great improvement has been the use of causal inference, where a given variable is posited as the one to be explained (the dependent variable) and one or more other variables are posited to be the explanatory factors. This enables verifying the overall validity of a given hypothesized model and the respective explanatory suitability of each variable included in the model (e. g., Rebhun 2014; Cohen 2018; Zick, Küpper, and Hövermann 2011).

The present paper demonstrates the use of SSA (Guttman 1968; Amar and Levy 2014) in developing an original and thus far little exploited approach to the study of Jewish perceptions of antisemitism. SSA is part of the broader concept of Facet Theory, which is an approach to theory construction integrating research planning with data analysis. SSA aims at exploring the interrelationships that exist among large numbers of variables rather than focusing on explaining only one at a time. SSA computes the correlations between each of the different answers, in this case based on the original FRA survey response distributions within each of the 12 EU countries. In SSA, correlations are based on rank orders of variables' values and not on the actual metrics of their quantitative differences. To make the concept of correlation absolutely clear to the general reader, if two or several respondents gave identical answers to two different questions, this means that the inherent contents of those two questions were very similar, and the two questions were strongly correlated. If the answers provided by different respondents were different, the correlation between those questions was weaker or even negative. The SSA software transforms these correlation coefficients – stronger or weaker – into appropriate distances – respectively, shorter or larger – between points on a bi-dimensional map, each point representing one variable. The emerging visual configurations are helpful in assessing the overall contents of subject matter and its logical partitions. Different spatial domains detected on a map – each with its own shared homogeneous contents visually similar to the example shown in Figure 5 above – represent a higher order of generalization concerning the one or more variables included in each domain. Such conceptual domains can be hypothesized a priori or left to be determined by the software. Each domain thus detected may contain one or more variables according to the number of pertinent questions that were asked in the survey instrument.

SSA maps shown later in this paper represent the entire configuration of all possible distances between each variable and each of the others – as resulting from the different response options provided by over 16,000 respondents in the 12 countries investigated. This is the largest number of Jewish respondents ever obtained in a research project undertaken in Europe. The total response obtained and the inter-country differences in consensual versus polarized perceptions of antisemitism provide the empirical evidence needed to evaluate the internal articulation and plausible structure of the topic observed.

SSA has the advantage of not being very sensitive to imperfect representation of the target population because of biased sampling. The method focuses on associations between variables rather than on their frequencies. It has no explicit pretension of searching for causal-directional relationships between variables, although it may help to establish causality hypotheses. It rather attempts to present a picture of logical interrelationships and affinities between different concepts and variables, thus refining the understanding of connections or incompatibilities between relevant domains of contents. Causal directionality of those associations will sometimes be self-evident although under other circumstances, it may remain not adjudicated. SSA's main goal is to stimulate theory and hypothesis formulation toward a better holistic understanding of the topic studied. It may be useful to develop new typologies or to demonstrate the inconsistency of existing ones.

Each of the SSA maps that will be presented below is the equivalent of a bi-variate or multi-variate statistical table in which one dimension is the 12 countries observed, and the other dimension is the category distribution of the antisemitism-related variable (or variables) in question. Moderate rotations in the different map displays do not have analytic meaning. Some rotations were introduced in the graphics that follow to make the results more easily readable and immediately comparable. All the original tables were published in the original FRA report (FRA 2018a).

To exemplify the approach adopted in this paper, I reproduce in Table 2 one of the tables from the FRA 2018 survey report. These data constitute the basis for the elaboration of Figure 6 presented in the next section of this paper. In the figure, as will be seen, the HUDAP software (Amar and Toledano 2001) transforms the original table into a matrix where the differences between the values reported in each row – representing the different response options – are modulated according to the differences across the different columns – representing the different countries included in this study.

Table 2:

Assessing Social and Political Issues as a Problem, by EU Member State (%) a, b, c, d, e.

^aOut of all respondents (n = 16,395); country results are unweighted; 12 country average is weighted.

^bQuestion: B02. To what extent do you think the following are a problem in [COUNTRY] (Items as listed in the table)?

^cThe results presented in the table are the sum of answer categories ‘a very big problem' and ‘a fairly big problem.'

^dThe social issues are listed in descending order according to the average of the 12 countries.

^eFor each country, the three most serious problems – as assessed by the respondents – are highlighted in the table.

Source: FRA (2018a, Table 1).

Key to countries: AT: Austria; BE: Belgium; DE: Germany; DK: Denmark; ES: Spain; FR: France; HU: Hungary; IT: Italy; NE: The Netherlands; PL: Poland; SE: Sweden; UK: United Kingdom.

Figure 6:

SSA of Perceptions of Selected Social and Political Issues, Modulated by Countries.

Modulating the categories in each variable by the 12 countries covered in the 2018 survey amounts to attributing the same weight to each country. This is obviously incorrect in terms of the size of the respective Jewish populations: the core Jewish population in the 12 counties ranged in 2018 between 450,000 in France and 4,500 in Poland (DellaPergola 2019). On the other hand, the actual final target and recipient of the antisemitic message – if any – is the individual Jew. Had we modulated the tables by the over 16,000 respondents, and not by the 12 countries, the large numerical impact of the major Jewish populations would have minimized the impact of the smaller ones, thus biasing the total picture in the direction of France, the UK and, to some extent, Germany. By choosing to present the following data unweighted by the size of a country's Jewish population, the underlying hypothesis is that there exists a strong dependency of Jewish life on the unfolding of cognition and experiences at the national level of each country. I thus make this hypothesis explicit, while acknowledging that alternative analyses conducted at the individual respondent level might produce somewhat different results. Experience from previous research suggests that those differences would not affect the main thrust of the analysis, as in most cases inter-country perceptional differences would tend to prevail over intra-country differences.

By the same token, each of the subsequent SSA maps in this paper was derived from one or more tables in the original FRA report (FRA 2018a). The present study indeed largely complements the original 2018 FRA report by using the same database, although differently. Rather than describing facts and frequencies, as prevalent in most research including the original report, I aim at uncovering the deeper layers of explicit and latent meaning of the antisemitic phenomenology in the European Jewish context. One original contribution of this paper is the combination of various tables into one conglomerate map, thus transforming the original bi-variate analysis into a multiple-variable analysis. After computing the correlations emerging from intercountry variation not on one but simultaneously on several variables, the product is as if the pertinent maps of the respective variables had been superimposed one over the other. This helps to detect and integrate relationships between categories and concepts originally presented as separate items. I trust the reader will find the following analysis intuitively accessible and innovative, no less enlightening than the original materials, and a useful complement to the initial publication of the FRA 2018 survey results.

4.1 Social and Political Issues

Initially, in order to demonstrate the method of analysis followed, I shall address the perception of antisemitism in the broader context of problematic societal issues in the 12 EU countries included in the 2018 FRA survey. Respondents were asked to assess their concern about a selection of social and political issues in the respective countries. The question [B02] was: To what extent do you think the following items are a problem in your country? The issues listed included unemployment, crime levels, immigration, antisemitism, racism, intolerance towards Muslims, and government corruption. This exploration of cognitive perceptions aimed at placing antisemitism in a broader context, namely, to what extent Jews perceive antisemitism as a predominant and central concern or rather than one among many other social issues in their country today.

Figure 6 reports the emerging SSA configuration based on seven categories. As already noted, this is the graphic equivalent of Table 2 above. Figure 6 graphically demonstrates the internal configuration of the main variable (main societal issues), reflecting the underlying statistical correlations between its various categories. The display provides a basis for a more complex understanding of the inherent meaning of that variable, which, in turn, may produce useful insights for more complex theoretical elaboration. The several categories listed in the original table are scattered on the map in a way that suggests the existence of broad er underlying conceptual domains. Had more items been included in the original questionnaire, they either might have filled some of the empty spaces that appear within each of the main domains detected or might have generated additional principal domains.

Of the various items selected for evaluation, concern about antisemitism was the issue evoking the highest response (85% of respondents) followed by racism (84%). The issue drawing the lowest response was government corruption (38%). Quite significant variation emerged across countries regarding the different issue frequencies. In the SSA map, social and political issues judged as nationally significant display a circular-radial pattern with a clear central focus. Antisemitism and racism clearly figure at the core of Jewish public concerns. The analytic meaning of the display is that – not unexpectedly – perceptions of antisemitism and of racism are highly and mutually correlated and evidently constitute the societal issues of paramount Jewish concern. Fears of antisemitism and racism are correlated with other issues more strongly than each of the other issues is with all of the others on the list. Such worry is widely shared across the whole Jewish population spectrum. Jewish respondents perceive other concerns in more selective modes also reflecting their exposure to different national contexts, as well as different personal characteristics and sensitivities.

The other societal concerns are displayed as wedges around the central core and reveal interesting interrelationship patterns. Unemployment (67% of respondents) and crime level (70%) appear strongly clustered in a socioeconomic domain. European Jews do not perceive these issues as belonging to the same domain as immigration (65%), which in recent years constituted a high-profile theme in public political and socioeconomic discourse in many European countries. Intolerance toward Muslims (57%) following the recent arrival or generational coming of age of large minorities from North Africa and other Middle East and African countries is not perceived by Jews as part of the same immigration domain either. Finally, government corruption appears as a further separate concern domain.

On the face of these data, perceptions of European Jews appear to be remarkably at odds with the main thread of political debates in most contemporary European societies. This may, perhaps, be interpreted as a symptom of many Jews' persisting ability to preserve sober and independent judgment vis-à-vis the main social and political issues that animate national political discourses and decisions. It is also possible, however, that these data are a symptom of Jews' estrangement and disenchantment from mainstream European politics. The strongly perceived centrality of concerns related mainly to the Jewish community itself and an evaluation of other main issues that differs from the majority of society may carry momentous consequences for continuing a relationship of mutual understanding between Jews and the majority of the population.

4.2 Contents of Antisemitism

Following the discussion sketched earlier in this paper, antisemitism can be conceptualized in many different ways. Several of the main possible contents were suggested to the respondents through questions that addressed both cognitive and experiential levels. One of the aims of the FRA survey was better to document the differing incidence of the phenomenon as something that cognitively “is in the air” versus its actual manifestation in the experience of real people. A substantial gap of tens of percentage points separates opinions about the phenomenon from actual experiences of its occurrence. Here the aim is to ascertain whether the structure of Jewish perceptions is similar or different at the cognitive and experiential levels.

4.2.1 Cognitive Level

Reflecting accumulated knowledge from previous scientific research and general wisdom as discussed above in this paper, a broad catalogue of statements offensive to Jews was compiled. A selection of these statements was included in the 2018 FRA survey. One initial analysis here is devoted to where, when, and to what extent Jews in Europe perceive such statements as antisemitic. The question [B17] was: Would you consider a non-Jewish person to be antisemitic if he or she believes (items as listed)? Figure 7 reports the relevant SSA map based on six categories.

Figure 7:

SSA of Perceptions as Antisemitic of Certain Opinions or Actions by Non-Jews, Modulated by Countries.

It is immediately apparent that the configuration in Figure 7 is different from the one displayed in Figure 6. Instead of a circular-radial shape (with or without a central focus), we have an axial-parallel shape. The analytic difference is that a circular shape has no beginning and no end, hence no hierarchy, whereas – if existing – a central spot may indicate the dominant or at least the main connective element among all others. An axial shape, on the other hand, displays an ordinal (if not hierarchic) progression of some underlying element or component, from one extreme end to an opposite end. In other words, the various elements under examination appear to be ordered according to an underlying logic.

Reading Figure 7 from the upper right corner to the bottom left corner, we find in succession a perception that it is antisemitic: to believe that Jews are not nationals in a given country's context – 94% of respondents; that one would not marry a Jew – 59%; that one always notes who is Jewish among personal acquaintances – 55%. These perception categories can be collapsed into one comprehensive domain grounded in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, i. e., classic nineteenth and twentieth-century antisemitism. The opposite bottom-left corner hosts perceptions of antisemitism in the case when the State of Israel and its citizens are depicted as entities to be criticized and boycotted. If an explicit question about BDS (Boycott, Disinvest, Sanction) had been asked, that is where in all likelihood it would have been placed. The rationale behind the figure's display seems to be historical chronology. Jewish foreignness is certainly the most ancient element, followed by a more modern elaboration about racist discrimination, while Israel, evidently, is the more recent development in global and Jewish history. As time goes by, Israel tends to become integrally incorporated within the Jewish perceptions of antisemitic notions and behaviors.

It is noteworthy in this respect that only 38% of European Jews believe that criticizing Israel is antisemitic, whereas 82% believe that boycotting Israel and Israelis is. The categories of opposition to Israel and of Jews possessing recognizable features (75% of respondents) are conceptually separated. It is, nevertheless, interesting to note the closeness of the respective categories. This demonstrates a Jewish perception of the existence of a diffused opinion that not only Jews but also Israelis possess distinctive and negative physical or character features. If this reading is accurate, it means that anti-Israel hostility pertains to a domain not necessarily or not exclusively related to contemporary political contingencies – normally the object of much debate and critique, including considerable disagreement within the Jewish camp. Emerging illegitimacy rather tends increasingly to reflect an alleged intrinsic property, hence becoming cognate to classic antisemitism.

4.2.2 Experiential Level

I turn now to a similar analysis of the perceptions of antisemitic contents as actually experienced by respondents. The question [B15a] was: In the last 12 months, have you ever personally heard or seen non-Jewish people in our country suggest that (Items as listed)? Multiple answers allowed. Figure 8, based on eight categories, presents the pertinent SSA map.

Figure 8:

SSA of Selected Antisemitic Statements Heard or Seen by Non-Jewish People, Modulated by Countries.

Not unlike the previous map based on cognitive perceptions, experiential perceptions in the current map result in an axial display whose components can be synthetized in four or five domains. In the upper-right corner, we find judgments of Jews responding to attributes that conform to the tenets of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, such as dominance, foreignness and selfishness (Jews hold too much power – 43% of respondents; interests of Jews are different from the rest of population – 22%; Jews are not capable of integrating into the given country's society – 11%). Another domain concerns judgment about the Shoah (The Holocaust is a myth or has been exaggerated – 24%; Jews exploit Holocaust victimhood for their own purposes – 35%). Next is a domain about self-culpability (Jews bring antisemitism on themselves – 32%). The final domain in the bottom-left corner concerns Israel (Israelis behave as Nazis toward the Palestinians – 51%; The world would be a better place without Israel – 33%).

As in the previous display, the ordering of the different parallel bands seems to reflect some historical chronology: from the older patterns of classic anti-Jewish prejudice, through the denial and minimization of Shoah, to the more recent delegitimization of the State of Israel. The formats of Figure 7, reflecting the cognitive perceptions, and Figure 8, reflecting the experiential perceptions, respond to the same underlying ordinal-hierarchical logic. Proximity of Jewish perceptions concerning the Holocaust and Israel is a significant finding to be kept in mind for further consideration.

4.2.3 Combined Levels

A joint display of the perceived contents of antisemitism (Figure 9) is significant in conjunction with the separate cognitive and experiential displays. Figure 9 presents the combined processing of the 14 categories displayed in Figure 7 and Figure 8. When mapping together data from two different variables, it may be expected that the domains subdivide and regroup either according to the perceptional mode (cognitive vs. experiential) or according to the inherent substantive contents of the questions involved.

Figure 9:

SSA of Combined Cognitive and Experiential Perceptions of Antisemitic Expressions, Modulated by Countries.

On the one hand, it is notable how neatly distinct the cognitive and experiential perceptions appear horizontally divided on this map. The two perceptional domains tend to form separate “banks” of questions and issues. On the other hand, the substantive contents are clearly organized into three main domains: from right to left, Protocols-type, Holocaust, and Israel oriented – regardless of the cognitive or experiential nature of the category. It is remarkable how close Holocaust-related categories are perceived to be to the classic antisemitic concepts. Apparently, in the course of time and since the previous 2012 FRA survey, a certain evolution in the Jewish perceptions of hostile concepts and behaviors occurred. This entails a coalescence of Holocaust-related categories with old, classic antisemitism and of Israel-related categories within the overall antisemitism pattern. Indeed, we find one cognitive category apparently out of context: the one saying that Jews have recognizable features appears in the Holocaust domain. This seems to be another proof of the gradual coalescence of the various contents components of the overall antisemitic paradigm. Such perceptional changes may or may not have reflected actual changes within the general societies of European countries, but they are, nonetheless, real within the contemporary Jewish community perception.

I shall note, in conclusion, that because of a lamentable oversight by the principal investigators, the Christian theme of deicide was not included in the survey questionnaire and therefore it cannot be assessed empirically in this analysis. It can be hypothesized that it would occupy a spot close to the classic prejudice markers as displayed here.

4.3 Channels of Transmission

Antisemitism, in addition to involving a complex array of ideas, attitudes and behaviors, requires certain mechanisms of diffusion in order effectively to attain its goals. In the course of history such channels of transmission radically transformed under the impact of modernization and technological change.

4.3.1 Cognitive Level

I first examine respondents' assessment at the cognitive level of how selected channels of antisemitism transmission, operating in the different countries, are perceived as problematic. The question [B04a] was: To what extent do you think the following are a problem in your country (items as listed)? The results appear in Figure 10, based on seven categories.

Figure 10:

SSA of Assessment of Manifestations of Antisemitism against Jewish Community as a Problem, Modulated by Countries.

In the circular-radial display of the selected channels of transmission, we note four main domains. The first domain concerns those modes involving physical action and aggression. Items covered in the 2018 study included: in the street or other public places (mentioned by 73% of respondents); vandalism of Jewish buildings or institutions (66%); and desecration of Jewish cemeteries (63%). The central position of the cemeteries desecration item in the map is notable and testifies to the high sensitivity attributed to this particular mode of action by the Jewish public at large. Considering the physical and immediately documentable nature of this type of offense, it will be here defined as Practical antisemitism. A second domain includes expressions on the internet, including social media (89%, the most reported of all transmission channels), and mural graffiti (64%). Because of its immediate, spontaneous and defamatory character it will be here defined as Populist antisemitism. A third domain involves the Media other than the Internet, namely, the printed and electronic press (71%). Because of its thoughtful and researched character, it will be here defined as Narrative antisemitism. A fourth domain involves Political life (70%), where the contents are conveyed by a Political antisemitism mode of thought and action, also influenced by other public concerns and interests and conducted by actors involved in leadership struggles and currying favorable public opinion.

4.3.2 Experiential Level

At the experiential level, we are interested in assessing where and through which transmission channels Jews actually encountered antisemitic expressions, behaviors, or personal harassment. The question [B16a] was: In the last 12 months, where did you personally hear or see these comments (items as listed)? Multiple responses possible. The pertinent map, based on 11 categories, appears in Figure 11.

Figure 11:

SSA of Context of Negative Statements about Jews made by Non-Jewish People, Modulated by Countries.

The patterns reported in Figure 11 reflect the specific tools and channels included in the survey questionnaire. At first sight, the map features many similarities with the previous one, with the exception of the Practical mode of antisemitism which was not included in the question asked here. As with the cognitive question reported above, the most frequent transmission channel of antisemitic messages was: on the internet, including social media (80% of respondents). This pertains to the Populist antisemitism domain along with: in a social situation (47%); in a public space (44%); and at sports events (11%) – stressing again the spontaneous and undisciplined character of such contexts. The more thoughtful, elaborated Narrative antisemitism domain primarily included: In academia (19%) and At cultural events (18%). The Political antisemitism domain included: at political events (48%) and in political speeches or discussions (40%). The category – in the Media other than internet and social media (56%) appears at the center of what might be a domain of its own along with a minor amount of response referring to undetermined channels (Somewhere else – 13%; Don't know – 4%). On further consideration, the edited and censored character of the mainstream printed and electronic media suggests considering it as a cognate to the Narrative mode. Reading the map differently, however, one notes that the position of the Media category appears to be intermediate between the Narrative and Political domains, occupying exactly the same space that in the previous figure was defined Practical antisemitism. It is as if in the experiential perceptions of European Jews, the media played the same immediate and brutal role of cemetery profanation or other forms of vandalism.

4.3.3 Combined Levels

The results of a combined processing of the 17 categories on transmission channels of antisemitism already seen in Figure 10 (cognitive) and Figure 11 (experiential) are displayed in Figure 12. The question here might be again whether the predominant organizing principle of the pertinent categories is the mode of perception (cognitive vs experiential), or the substantive meaning of the category. The actual data in Figure 12 provide a revealing blend of the two modes.

Figure 12:

SSA of Combined Cognitive and Experiential Perceptions of Channels of Transmission of Antisemitism, Modulated by Countries.

The separation between cognitive and experiential domains is very clearly distinguishable, with only one exception not included within a coherent contiguous space: the experiential notion of Political event, which is included in the cognitive area of the map. This category, however, appropriately pertains to a Political antisemitism domain together with a cognitive category, political life, and another experiential category, political speech. In general, cognitive categories are spatially more compact and concentrated than experiential categories, meaning that Jewish perceptions are more coherent and shared regarding cognition than regarding experience.

The main partitions of channels of transmission, however – Practical, Populist, Narrative, and Political – appear clearly, and each of them includes categories pertaining to both cognitive and experiential modes. What appears here is a robust new typology of perceptions of antisemitism to be followed in the subsequent analysis. Remarkably, the two transmission channels that were investigated in both modes – the Internet including social media and the Media other than internet – appear coherently within the respective domains (Populist and Narrative antisemitism, respectively). The currently leading channel of transmission – the Internet – is perceived at the cognitive level as intriguingly proximate to the veteran and sometimes celebrated category of Graffiti. It may be inspiring, indeed, to perceive the little screen universally available nowadays as cognate to the old wall where one could freely trace expressive drawings and mottos. Finally, one notes that the transmission category Else falls within the domain of Practical antisemitism, thus confirming what had been hypothesized for the map of experiential categories.

4.4 Sanction against Jewish Rituals and Discrimination against Jews

One further dimension of antisemitism perceptions relates to the concerns expressed by Jews in Europe regarding instances of possible (cognitive) and actual (experiential) discrimination suffered.

4.4.1 Cognitive Level

The cognitive aspect was explored through a question about attitudes to possible government sanction against two significant Jewish rituals: circumcision of Jewish male infants (brit milah) and ritual slaughter of animals (shechitah). The original survey question [F10] was formulated as follows: In the last 12 months, have you personally heard or seen non-Jewish people suggest that circumcision and traditional slaughter (shechitah) should NOT be allowed to take place in your country? The possible answers were: yes to both, yes to one only, or no. Reference is to a cognitive perception that such issues were raised in public debate rather than to an experiential exposure of respondents to the issue. With regard to the countries included in the 2018 FRA study, however, such sanctions against the ritual slaughtering of animals have already been implemented in Sweden, Denmark, and Belgium, with severe regulation in several other countries (Feder 2019). Legislation to ban circumcision was suggested in different countries but was not implemented anywhere in the countries surveyed here (Triadafilopoulos 2019). In general, government or other public opposition to protection of two significant Jewish rituals can be interpreted as a potential sanction against widely held Jewish tenets, and by extension, against Jews as such.

With varying intensity across countries, the topic of European legislation possibly curtailing free access to traditional options among Jewish communities was at the center of much attention and public debate in recent years. The percentage of total respondents for whom the prohibition of circumcision would be a problem was 82%, versus 69% for traditional slaughter. It should be acknowledged that the frequencies of actual practice of any of the mentioned Jewish rituals – i. e. circumcising one's own sons and consuming kosher meat – can be very different among any given Jewish population, and actual observance frequencies can be very different across the 12 EU countries investigated here. The relevance of the Jewish rituals mentioned here apparently involves the cognitive and emotional perceptions of Jewish individuals more than their behavioral sphere.

Overall, 9% of Jews in the 12 EU countries heard about the prohibition of circumcision, 11% about prohibition of ritual slaughtering, and 38% about both, for a total of 58%. Hence 42% had not heard about either. The pertinent SSA is reported in Figure 13. In the emerging map based on two categories (articulated in three partly overlapping options), the answers appear to be plotted in a circular-radial pattern. The total space is divided primarily between a domain of negative and a domain of positive answers. The positive answers domain is further partitioned between having heard about both issues, or about one issue only. Logically, the domain pertaining to the answer both represents the overlap of the two domains pertaining to either circumcision or ritual slaughter, and it therefore occupies an intermediate position between the two.

Figure 13:

SSA of Perceptions of Public Sanction against Brit Milah and Shechitah, Modulated by Countries.

4.4.2 Experiential level

The experiential level of actual discrimination suffered by Jewish respondents is explored through perceptions regarding four different possible manifestations related to their personal characteristics. The original survey question [F01] was: In the PAST 12 MONTHS have you personally felt discriminated against in your country for any of the following reasons: Skin color; Ethnic origin or immigrant background; Religion or belief; Age; Sex/Gender; Disability; Sexual orientation; Gender identity; For another reason. Multiple responses possible. Here we focus on four aspects: gender, age, religion, and ethnicity. The percentage of respondents indicating one of the other grounds for discrimination was relatively low (5% or less in the 12 EU Member States), and the number of respondents with relevant experiences was too small for country level analysis. Therefore, they were omitted from the present analysis (Figure 14, based on four categories).

Figure 14:

SSA of Perceptions of Discrimination Suffered by Jews on Selected Grounds, Modulated by Countries.

Among Jewish respondents in 2018, 21% reported having felt personally discriminated on grounds of religion or belief, 13% because of age, 12% because of gender, and 11% because of ethnic origin or immigrant background. The selected options appear once again in a circular-radial pattern. Religion and ethnicity occupy relatively close positions, testifying to a closer connection between the two. Gender and age occupy more distant and apparently unrelated positions.

The partitions outlined in Figure 14 suggest two possible interpretations of the data. Perhaps the more obvious is that age and gender represent demographic categories, thus forming one domain, whereas religion and ethnicity both constitute socio-cultural categories directly related to the Jewish identity of respondents, and thus regroup in another domain. An alternative construct might be that gender, in this case women, as the two socio-cultural categories, pertains to a shared domain of (normative) minorities that in most contemporary societies still struggle to achieve full equality of rights and equity of treatment. Women actually constitute the majority of population in most developed countries, but in many respects their status is similar to that of a minority that still must go a long way before it will have achieved full parity with the societally hegemonic group – in this case, males. Both possible interpretations are outlined in Figure 14.

4.4.3 Combined Levels

The combined configuration of feared sanction (cognitive) and suffered discrimination (experiential) appears in Figure 15, which results from the joint processing of the six categories displayed in Figure 13 and Figure 14.

Figure 15:

SSA of Combined Perceptions of Sanction Against Jewish Rituals and Discrimination Suffered, Modulated by Countries.

The two original variables – the cognitive and the experiential – can be distinguished as separate domains divided by the dotted line in the map. More significantly, however, the combined categories form two recognizable domains, one pertaining to the life cycle (age and gender) and one to ethno-religious identities. Among the latter, two relate to actual discrimination on religious and ethnic grounds and two to feared sanction against circumcision and animal slaughtering. In particular, the categories of circumcision and religion appear in the same domain although they pertain to two different survey questions. The main finding here is the clear substantive connection between perceptions of antisemitism, despite their different cognitive or experiential nature.

4.5 Perpetrators

Perceptions of antisemitic offenses go together with perceptions of who are the perpetrators of anti-Jewish harassment or violence. The 2018 FRA survey carried the following question [C06]: Who did this to you (items as listed)? Multiple responses possible. The categories of possible offenders were predetermined and included a variety of options ranging from ideological – political or religious – actors, to persons known through various kinds of social networks, to undetermined perpetrators. The findings, based on 10 categories, appear in Figure 16.

Figure 16:

SSA of Perceptions of the Perpetrator(S) in the Most Serious Antisemitic Incident of Harassment in the 5 Years before the Survey, Modulated by Countries.

The display on Figure 16 is axial, i. e., it reflects a categorical ordering of the variables involved. In the upper-right corner a strong perceptional proximity appears between Right-wing perpetrators (13% of respondents) and holders of Christian extremist views (5%). In the bottom-left corner there emerges some proximity between Left-wing (21%) and Muslim extremist perpetrators (30%). Quite logically, then, we find that the Right-wing/Christian domain stands at the opposite end of the map to the Left-wing/Islamic domain. It should be noted that following a specific FRA request, the categories mentioning the two religious backgrounds were confined to holders of extremist views, which may have significantly limited the reported frequency of these types of perpetrators.

In between, there appears a domain of perpetrators identified by various types of personal relationships or other personal characteristics (work or school/college colleague – 16%; a teenager or group of teenagers – 15%; an acquaintance or friend – 15%; a customer or client from work – 5%). Finally, a generic domain appears for others (someone else I cannot describe – 31%; someone else I can describe – 13%). Interestingly, the generic type domain is closer to the right-wing/Christian domain, while the identified type domain, namely, colleagues and acquaintances, is closer to the left-wing/Islamic domain. Whether this hints at the personal political opinions of respondents – closer to the Left than to the Right – cannot be determined here. The proximity between teenager and Muslim perpetrator also deserves attention.

It is worth recalling that the SSA spatial displays do not reflect the frequencies reported but rather the correlations between the various categories. It is noteworthy, however, that the cumulated percentages of perceived perpetrators (including multiple reporting) are as follows: Right/Christian – 18%; Left/Islamic – 51%; other specified – 51%; other unspecified – 48%). Wide variation characterizes the individual country distributions. I shall mention here merely that perpetrators with a Muslim extremist view were relatively the more numerous ones reported in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Perpetrators with a left-wing political view were the more frequent in Spain, Italy, and the UK. Perpetrators with a right-wing political view were the more frequent in Hungary and Poland.

4.6 Multiple Reporting

One final synthetic look at the different variables reviewed so far is obtained by comparing the propensity to report multiple options to a single question – for those variables where multiple options were allowed. In such cases, the total frequency of reported categories was considerably above 100%. Multiple reporting can be interpreted as an indication of a perception of greater diffusion of antisemitism across the spectrum of options pertinent to each specific question. It can also be interpreted as an indication of greater sensitivity to antisemitism by respondents, some of whom would report each minimal sign of the phenomenon, while others would focus only on the more powerful and worrying perceptions. Figure 17 describes the variation across countries of the tendency to report multiple options for each of the seven variables examined (sanction of Jewish rituals is not included because options were mutually exclusive with no multiple reporting).

Figure 17:

SSA of Patterns of Multiple Reporting Concerning Perceptions of Antisemitism, Modulated by Countries.

What again immediately appears in this circular display is the perceptional difference between cognitive and experiential variables. Cognitive variables are characterized by a much greater tendency to multiple reporting than experiential variables. Within this main distinction, on the cognitive side, we note a strong correlation between multiple reporting of social issues of national concern and of transmission channels of antisemitism. Antisemitism perceptions, as expressed through selected predetermined opinions, appear in a different domain. On the experiential side, the dots indicating the two variables – antisemitic contents actually heard and their transmission channels – perfectly overlap so that only one dot appears on the map. Such nearly total correlation between patterns of multiple reporting concerning the contents and the transmission channels of antisemitic experiences provides a first indication of a singularly important finding: the tool becomes a proxy for the contents. I shall further elaborate on this finding later in this report. In the experiential part of the map, multiple reporting about perpetrators occupies a domain not too distant from antisemitic contents and its transmission channels, with a further domain for multiple reporting about discrimination suffered.

5.1 Contents of Antisemitism and Transmission Channels

I look first at the combined perceptional patterns of contents of antisemitism and their transmission channels, including both cognitive and experiential aspects (Figure 18, based on 31 categories). The first observation is that the perceptional separation between cognitive and experiential aspects, as already noted above, prevails upon the substantive distinction between antisemitism contents and transmission channels. The two perceptional spaces can be clearly separated (see dotted line) with one exception only: the experiential category of political speech is included within the area of cognitive categories. It appears coherently included in the political antisemitism domain together with other categories, all of them cognitive. The whole perceptional space is also clearly divided into four main domains, – Populist, Political, Practical, and Narrative – which already emerged in the preceding analysis of individual antisemitism ingredients.

Figure 18:

SSA of Combined Cognitive and Experiential Perceptions of Contents of Antisemitism and Transmission Channels, Modulated by Countries.

a. Variable in Underlined Italics Address Contents; Variables in Regular Fonts Address Transmission Channels.

Each of the four antisemitism domains includes both cognitive and experiential variables. Remarkably, the cognitive category Internet (including other social media) occupies the center of the whole configuration. Evidently, this recently emerged and now dominant transmission channel has become totally identified with the subject matter it transmits. Proceeding through the different domains in clockwise direction from the upper right corner (Populist antisemitism), most of the concepts classified under the conventional Protocols-style antisemitism show up in this domain: alleged characteristics of the Jews as a foreign, selfish, predatory, and polluting element of society, to be avoided, marginalized, and, if possible, destroyed. Remarkably, Holocaust denial and minimization has become fully incorporated within these older negative stereotypes. Perceptions of Populist antisemitism contents are fully integrated within and not distinguishable from the perceptions of transmission channels. The latter involve in spontaneous ways the social and public space and sports events. As noted, prominently represented here are personal expressions of hatred and hostility through the internet, the social media, and their straightforward ancestor – the mural graffiti.

The Political antisemitism domain, too, draws from both cognitive and experiential variables. One such variable, experiential political events, actually appears out of range, marked by a circle midway between Populist and Narrative domains. On the other hand, the Political domain also hosts the caption: Jews are not country nationals – on the political side of classic antisemitism.

The Practical antisemitism domain, along with the already noted cognitive perceptions of vandalism against Jewish cemeteries and institutions and other street manifestations, includes the classic antisemitic notion of Jews as physically recognizable. It also includes the more recently emerging phenomenon of an Israel boycott. Because of their physical practical connotations, both categories remarkably fit the respective domain. The Boycott Israel's position is particularly interesting: the map shows its unequivocal perception by European Jews as a mode of practical antisemitism.

Finally, the Narrative antisemitism domain, along with the more sophisticated transmission channels of the Media other than internet, Cultural events, and Academia, clearly focuses on anti-Israeli contents: at the cognitive level it is Criticize Israel; at the experiential level – Israelis [are] Nazis, and The world would be better without Israel. The Media variable is represented here in both versions, cognitive and experiential, pointing again to the perceptional coherence between the two. The perceptional proximity of Academia with anti-Israel attitudes is a finding that cannot be ignored and requires further elaboration. The right to criticize Israel without being accused of antisemitism has been indeed a dominant leitmotif over recent decades, especially among the more educated sectors of society. The turning point obviously was the 1967 June war. Short of further interpretations, it is important to take notice that this is what European Jews feel and communicate through the web of category correlations unveiled by the SSA analysis.

5.2 Social Issues, Sanction, and Discrimination

I look next at the combined patterns of perceptions of national Social issues, Feared sanction (circumcision and slaughtering of animals), and Discrimination suffered, all inclusive of cognitive and experiential aspects (Figure 19, based on 13 categories). The map emerging here seems more complex and less straightforward than the previous one, but it provides several useful and also unexpected insights. Keep in mind that both Social issues and Feared sanctions are cognitive variables, whereas Discrimination suffered is experiential. In Figure 19, the domains pertaining to each survey question are separated by dotted lines, whereas the emerging contents domains are separated by the continuous lines. In the cognitive sphere, Social issue categories are indicated by triangle markers, and Feared sanction categories are marked by black dots.

Figure 19:

SSA of Combined Cognitive and Experiential Perceptions of Social Issues, Feared Sanction and Discrimination Suffered, Modulated by Countries.

In the bottom left corner of the map, the Ethnoreligious categories coalesce into one coherent domain, regardless of the different perceptional modes: Fear of sanction against circumcision and animal slaughtering, along with Discrimination suffered on grounds of Religion or Ethnic origin. The other categories of experienced discrimination – Age and Gender – both show up in a diagonal band forming a distinct Lifecycle domain. In turn, national social issues are spread across several domains, as already noted above in Figure 6. In the upper right corner, Crime and Unemployment form a Socio-economic domain, followed in axial sequence by a Political domain (Government corruption). Antisemitism stands at the center of an Ethno-cultural domain also inclusive of Racism and, in this case, of Immigration.

One intriguing aspect concerns the position on the map of Intolerance toward Muslims (marked by a dotted circle), a social issue that stands quite remote from Immigration and all other social issues and very close to the Feared sanction/cognitive/Ethnoreligious domain. One possible interpretation is that European Jews do perceive the problematic position of Muslims as a possibly sanctioned and discriminated minority. Jews may thus feel some possibly latent sense of affinity between their own position and that of Muslims in Europe. On the other hand, the interpretation might be oriented in a totally different direction: the proximity of Muslims with Jewish feared sanction and suffered discrimination might be a sign of a latent perception of Muslims constituting a menace to the position of Jews in society as people enjoying full equality and civil rights. If true, this would attribute to Muslims a dual role – among those who suffer intolerance by the majority of society but also among those who constitute a menacing source of intolerance against Jews. To appreciate which version may be closer to reality, we need to turn our attention to the nature of perpetrators of antisemitic acts.

One final thought again relates to the position on the map of the Feared discrimination domain. In the preceding description of variables, this one was attributed to the cognitive sphere. It may well be, however, that the highly emotional nature of the debate about the issue of circumcision implies that this domain pertains more to affective than to cognitive perceptions. This may indicate that if enough questions about the affective/emotional realm had been asked, the relevant categories would have found an independent place in the overall antisemitism perceptional space.

5.3 The Perceived Position of Perpetrators

I shall now examine how the perception of perpetrators integrates with the various perceptions of antisemitism examined so far. This is obtained by processing perpetrators perception data simultaneously with other relevant variables and condensing the findings in appropriate SSA maps.

5.3.1 Contents of Antisemitism and Transmission Channels

I look first at the combined cognitive and experiential perceptions of contents of antisemitism and transmission channels, jointly with perpetrators (Figure 20). With the additional input of perpetrators' categories, Figure 20, based on 38 categories, reproduces very faithfully Figure 18, with the exception of [2] Media, which appears now to be transferred from the Narrative antisemitism to the Practical antisemitism domain.

Figure 20:

SSA of Combined Cognitive and Experiential Perceptions of Contents of Antisemitism and Transmission Channels, with Perpetrators, Modulated by Countries.

In the map, Perpetrator categories – classified as experiential perceptions – appear as yellow triangle markers, cognitive antisemitism (contents and transmission channels together) as blue dots, and experiential antisemitism (contents and transmission together) as yellow dots. With only very modest positional changes, the main partition between cognitive and experiential variables confirms my previous observations. The cognitive variables are regrouped mainly in the central parts of the configuration, with only a few outliers, namely: [21] Would not marry a Jew and [18] Jews not country nationals. Again, the cognitive perception of Internet including other social media, as the consensually agreed leading conveyor of antisemitism, occupies the center of the entire configuration.

Perpetrator categories appear on the map as an elliptic, external pattern running all around the other variables, and intersecting through the four main classification domains of Jewish antisemitism perceptions: the Populist, the Political, the Practical, and the Narrative. A clear division of labor appears in the first place between the Right-and-Christian and the Left-and-Islamic types. The former are strongly associated with the Populist antisemitism domain, characterized by instinctive, improvised, conventional anti-Jewish prejudice. The latter are strongly associated with the Narrative antisemitism domain, characterized by cultivated, thoughtful, anti-Israel prejudice. Other types of perpetrators stand in between. The colleague and acquaintance perpetrator types appear in between Populist and Narrative antisemitism domains; the teenager but also the customer perpetrator types appear in the Practical antisemitism domain. Here it becomes more apparent how the Political antisemitism domain is much closer to the Right/Christian than to the Left/Islamic perpetrator types.

5.3.2 Social Issues, Sanction, and Discrimination

I turn now to the combined cognitive and experiential perceptions of national social issues, feared sanction, and discrimination suffered, jointly with perpetrators (Figure 21). Figure 21, based on 21 categories, reproduces with some adaptations the contents of Figure 19, with the additional input of perpetrators' categories. As in the previous Figure 20, perpetrator categories appear on the map as an elliptic, external pattern running all around the other variables.

Figure 21:

SSA of Combined Cognitive and Experiential Perceptions of Social Issues, Feared Sanction and Discrimination Suffered, with Perpetrators, Modulated by Countries.

The different topics outlined in Figure 21 – see the diagonal dotted lines – appear again as distinct domains, once again outlining the separation between cognitive and experiential variables. Several substantive domains comprise the different categories: Socioeconomic, including Crime and Unemployment; Political, including Government corruption; Ethno-cultural, including Antisemitism, Racism and Immigration; Lifecycle, including Age and Gender; and Ethno-religious, including a combination of feared sanction against Jewish rituals (circumcision and slaughtering), Discrimination suffered (on religious and ethnic background), and concern for intolerance against Muslims. The latter again appears significantly out of its natural context among other national social issues covered in the FRA study. At the center of the whole configuration stands Antisemitism as a cognitive social issue of concern.

The findings emerging here are of capital importance: among a large representative sample of European Jews, the cognitive aspects of antisemitism – more than anything else – constitute an organizing origin and central principle of all other perceptional aspects.

The position of perpetrators on this map reveals other important underlying principles of antisemitism perceptions. In Jewish perceptions, Right-wing and Christian perpetrators strongly correlate with racism and intolerance versus Muslims. Left-wing and Islamic perpetrators tend to be perceived more in the association with general social issues, such as crime, unemployment, and immigration. Concern with immigration, in turn, is associated with Muslims as antisemitism perpetrators. The complex dual role of Muslims in Jewish perceptions re-emerges here patently: Muslims are seen simultaneously as victims of societal discrimination and as perpetrators of anti-Jewish offenses. The correspondence between Teenager and Muslim perpetrators now becomes clearer. It also points to an affinity with the already described composite domain of feared sanction against Jewish rituals (cognitive) and discrimination of Jews on religio-ethnic grounds (experiential). The possibility that Feared sanction about circumcision and ritual slaughtering actually pertains to an affective/emotional rather than cognitive realm is confirmed here.

5.4 The Whole Picture

The final more complex and multiple-variable picture in the present analysis is obtained by superimposing all the perceptional layers examined so far: contents of antisemitism, transmission channels, societal issues, feared sanction, discrimination suffered, and perpetrators (Figure 22, based on 52 categories). Reading of the map is not the easiest because of the many and diverse variables included. The need to accommodate so many factors within one synthetic map may cause the shifting of some variables from the position already noted in previous maps to different positions, reflecting the more numerous and complex interrelations with all other variables examined. To render the reading easier, a legend reports the full list of variables, their detailed respective categories, their numbering on the map, and the respective different recognizable markers.

Figure 22:

SSA of Combined Cognitive and Experiential Perceptions of Contents of Antisemitism, Transmission Channels, Social Issues, Feared Sanction and Discrimination Suffered, with Perpetrators, Modulated by Countries.

The fundamental findings have already been established from the previous analysis. In the first place the distinction between cognitive and experiential variables determines a clear-cut division with only one evident outlier: [21] Would not marry a Jew – a cognitive-attitudinal questions positioned within the experiential-behavioral main domain.

Within this basic distinction, the four-fold main antisemitism typology hypothesized and largely confirmed by the foregoing analysis appears as an important organizing principle within the gamut of antisemitism perceptions. At the center of the whole configuration, two categories constitute the origin, synthesis, and main focal point actually shared by all four antisemitism domains. This dual central point includes: [40] Antisemitism – a cognitive variable – entering this map as the prime national social issue of concern; and [11] Internet including social media – also a cognitive variable – entering as the prime transmission channel. The focus of antisemitism perceptions on the cognitive more than on the experiential sphere is the crucial qualifier of the whole syndrome investigated here. The two variables of contents and transmission produce a powerful synergy through the two categories Antisemitism as the prime perceived national issue and the Internet as its prime perceived diffusor.

The combination of so many aspects of antisemitism perceptions reported in Figure 22 reveals several other more or less intimate connections and affinities between topics that usually are discussed separately. One aspect, already noted above, is the domain coherence between features observed both at the cognitive and the experiential level. This is the case with the Internet including social media, perceived as a central transmission channel [11] and as an actual conveyor of antisemitic hatred [1]. Both pertain to the Populist antisemitism domain. In turn, the Media other than the Internet, perceived as a potential [13] and actual [3] vehicle, both fall in the Narrative antisemitism domain. The configuration of all other markers of antisemitism contents and transmission channels within main domains is approximately the same as already seen above in Figure 18 and Figure 20.

It is interesting to assess how and where variables related to feared sanction, discrimination suffered, and social issues appear within this grid of domains. Discrimination suffered on various grounds [49, 50, 51, 52] appears in the Populist domain. Sanction feared against Circumcision [47] appears – quite logically – in the Practical domain, whereas sanction against Animal slaughtering quite appropriately appears in the political domain. With regard to social issues of national concern, Crime level [42] and Unemployment [43] enter into the Practical domain, Immigration [44] into the Narrative domain, Racism [41] into the Political domain, and Government corruption [46] into the Populist domain. The latter domain also hosts Intolerance against Muslims [45].

Perpetrators are now more clearly split between the Populist domain (Christian extremist [33], Right-wing [35], and Colleague [37]), and the Narrative domain (Muslim extremist [32], Left-wing [34], acquaintance [36], customer [38], and teenager [39]).

Summing up, the perceptions of antisemitism contents and transmission channels in this comprehensive analysis confirm the main patterns already seen in greater detail. Classic antisemitic stereotypes touching upon alleged negative characteristics of Jews and Holocaust denial are rooted together with the improvised expressions of the Social media, Graffiti, Public space, and Sports events within the Populist antisemitism domain. Negative and demonizing expressions about Israel are rooted together with the learned and polished tools of the Media, Academia, and Culture within the Narrative antisemitism domain. The dual perception of Muslims is again worth noting: as victims of intolerance associated with perceptions of Right-wing and Christian perpetrators and as perpetrators associated with perceptions of Left-wing peers.