“Good morning darling,” said the anonymous phone caller to the administrator at my local synagogue last week. “I just wanted to know how much you charge for the kids’ blood that you drink, I wanted to place an order.”
It’s the blood libel revived: a medieval anti-Jewish myth invented almost 900 years ago, reheated for 2024 – in the cauldron of emotions kept boiling away by conflict in Israel and Palestine. I’d call this unusual, except it is a lot less unusual than it used to be. Anti-Jewish hate crime skyrocketed after the Hamas attack on Israel last year and still hasn’t returned to what we used to consider “normal”. There have been almost as many antisemitic incidents in the year since 7 October 2023 as there were in the whole of 2020, 2021 and 2022 combined, according to figures from the Community Security Trust.
It’s complacent to assume Israel’s war against Hamas causes this. Antisemites have always found ways to justify their contempt for Jews: either by referring to bad things some Jews have done, inventing things they haven’t done, or blaming them for things other people do. Right now, it feels like all three are in play. The Marxist theorist Norman Geras called this “alibi antisemitism”, and nothing provides a greater alibi than Israel. That this fresh surge in visceral hatred began on 7 October itself, while Hamas gunmen were still raping festival-goers and burning kibbutz families in their homes, says everything.
However, to focus only on antisemitism that can be seen and measured misses the point, not least because most Jewish people still go about their daily lives without problems. Deeper scars are being inflicted across the community by a shift that doesn’t fit neatly into official statistics. This is found instead in the quiet shunning by schoolfriends, the dirty looks on the train when someone spots your Star of David necklace, or the colleagues’ social media post hoping for a world in which Israel does not exist.
Most Jews care deeply about Israel. This shouldn’t be a surprise: it is the land where the Jewish people first formed and references to it punctuate Jewish prayer. Today it is the only Jewish state in a world without many Jews at all. This attachment doesn’t always align with political support, and most British Jews strongly disapprove of Israel’s current leader. You can debate the rights and wrongs of this all day long, but you may as well try to argue away the existence of mountains as persuade Jews that Israel is a modern colonial artifice to which they have no authentic, historic link. It’s an identity thing, like it or not.
It can seem almost impossible to navigate the grief of 7 October, fear for the hostages still in captivity, empathy for the endless suffering of Palestinians and now Lebanese, and anxiety about increased antisemitism at home. This becomes even harder when so many people who might otherwise be allies against antisemitism have concluded that Israel simply should not exist, and that Zionism – the movement that created Jewish national self-determination – ranks alongside nazism and apartheid in political demonology. It all adds up to a shift in the atmosphere, as if the temperature for Jews has dropped a few degrees.
The pressure comes from all sides. Watching Tucker Carlson nodding away while a guest on his show named Winston Churchill – not Adolf Hitler – as the greatest villain of the second world war and claimed that millions died in Nazi camps not through design but by accident was a reminder of how easily Holocaust denial can still find its place in today’s politics. When anti-Muslim riots swept across British towns in August, the online forums used to organise them were replete with arguments about whether Jews were the real enemy, because according to many on the far right, mass immigration is part of a Jewish plot to destroy white civilisation. And these fascist conspiracy theorists found their counterparts in those parts of the anti-fascist response who claimed the riots were themselves orchestrated by Israel. At least they agree on something: whatever you think is going wrong in the world, there are always Jews to blame.
Some deal with this by ducking beneath the duvet until, hopefully, it all passes. The Jewish university students who walk the long way round to their lectures to avoid the protest encampments, or the central London synagogues that cancel events and shorten their services on days when anti-Israel demonstrations march past their front doors. It wears you down, wondering whether some random stranger is going to call you a genocidal baby killer.
Others do the opposite and are more defiantly, openly Jewish than ever. Buy that Star of David pendant, wear that hostage ribbon with pride. It feels more resilient but both responses spring from the same, new root, which is the need to think deeply about what it means to be Jewish in today’s Britain.
I know people who changed jobs because they didn’t feel safe as a Jew in their existing workplaces after 7 October; others whose children changed schools for the same reason. When friends return to the UK after visiting Israel they say they felt much safer there than here. This seems irrational: physically they are in much more danger in Israel. “But I could be myself there and not worry”, they reply. These fears are not about physical safety but identity safety: the ability to be openly Jewish without risking your friendships, standing or dignity.
This is why new Jewish staff WhatsApp groups sprang up in countless workplaces after 7 October, for mutual support amid stories of antisemitism from colleagues and indifference from bosses. In some sectors the problems are so widespread that the WhatsApp groups are industry-wide. Many of those workplaces have Muslim staff WhatsApp groups too. They both provide safe spaces, operating in parallel but apart, an understandable and even necessary step in these times – but they also reflect a silent fracturing of our communities.
This is all new. Postwar British Jewry has been one of the great success stories in Jewish history, albeit in a typically understated British way. The life this community has built here and its contribution to modern Britain are worthy of celebration, but it feels like that golden age is over. Perhaps this is just a reversion to the mean of Jewish history, and we are far from catastrophe; but still, that doesn’t mean anyone – Jewish or not – should accept it.
Dave Rich is director of policy at the Community Security Trust and the author of Everyday Hate: How antisemitism is built into our world – and how you can change it
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