Anti-Semitism, the disease that refuses to be cured

George Steiner, the distinguished literary critic and influential thinker, is well known in Canada since his 1974 CBC Massey Lectures “Nostalgia for the Absolute.” In an interview not long ago, reflecting on being a Jew, he suggested that “there is a hatred of Jews wherever there are no longer any Jews; even where there have never been Jews.”

Poland is a case in point. Before the Holocaust, there were some 3.5 million Jews in the country, about 10 per cent of the population. Three million were exterminated and most of the survivors moved elsewhere. Today, there are only a few thousand left. Yet in a recent survey, 80 per cent of Poles said that they wouldn’t like to live next to a Jew.

Though there have been Jews in Canada for some two centuries, they’re a very small minority in the country. Even allowing for the growth of the Jewish population here after the Second World War, Jews constitute less than 1 per cent of the 36 million people who live here. Yet some 13 per cent of reported hate-motivated crimes in 2015 — the last year for which there are statistics — had Jews as their target.

Muslims come second. But though there are three times as many Muslims in Canada as there are Jews, the number of hate crimes against them was 1 per cent less than against Jews. Though there’s always enmity of the “other” whoever s/he may be, the Jew is still being targeted much more than any other member of a minority.

Canada is one of the most open and safe countries in the world, but seemingly not quite as safe for Jews as it is for others.

Europe has witnessed many more and much more lethal incidents, even though in most European countries, as in Poland, the number of Jews who live there after the Holocaust is very small, even in comparison to Canada’s 1 per cent.

Every age and every culture has its own excuses for persecuting Jews. Evidence isn’t required. Thus when the Church dominated Europe, the Jews were declared Christ-killers, ignoring the fact that Jesus was a Jew. When nationalism was in fashion, the Jews were deemed to be subversive enemies of the people. When communism ruled the day, the Jews were “rootless cosmopolitan” stooges of capitalism. Nowadays, of course, Jews are often conveniently described as the oppressors of hapless Palestinians.

The fact that, today, Muslims in Europe are almost as vulnerable as Jews doesn’t stop Muslims from attacking Jews. Recent incidents in France are still fresh in our minds. Last June, days after the fire that killed some 80 residents in a low-income apartment complex in London, Muslims demonstrated in the streets of the British capital blaming “the Zionists” (read: the Jews) for the tragedy.

Though often they themselves are victims of prejudice, hatred and discrimination from the Indigenous population in Britain, it didn’t inhibit the many hundred Muslim marchers to make the accusation. Victimhood of Islamophobia doesn’t seem to prevent victimization under the banner of antiSemitism.

Canada has mercifully never been in the grip of an ideology that needed an enemy, but being different is enough to be vulnerable. Though Jews are by no means alone in this, they still seem to be targeted more often than others.

Over the years, I’ve written several times about the issue of anti-Semitism on this page as a reminder of the disease that refuses to be cured. As a Jew and subject to anti-Semitic taunts in Poland when I was a child, and in Sweden where I grew up, I know whereof I write. Dispassionate scholars may bring the evidence, but Jews are here to tell the tale.

Victimhood of Islamophobia doesn’t seem to prevent victimization under the banner of anti-Semitism