Europe’s Jews

The essays in Edward Alexander’s forthcoming Jews Against Themselves are an excoriating assault on Jewish “apostates”—Jews who, in the words of Maimonides, separate themselves “from the community” or “hold aloof from the congregation of Israel” and is “indifferent when they are in distress.” In Maimonides’s opinion, such no longer “belong to the Jewish people” and they have “no share in the world to come.”

Alexander’s apostates are Jews who are not only indifferent to the distress of Jews in Israel, but who join the anti-Israeli chorus. The genus comes in many species, and Alexander offers a brief taxonomy: “Jewish progressives against Israel; Jewish queers against Israel; Haredim against Israel; Holocaust survivors against Israel; children of Holocaust survivors against Israel; Jewish Voice for Peace; grandchildren of Holocaust survivors against Israel; survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto against Israel; J Street; Jewish postmodernists against Israel; Jewish Berkeley professors against Israel; post-Zionists against Israel; Jewish members of MESA (Middle East Studies Association) against Israel; Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods (JBIG, also called, seasonally, London’s Jewish Christmas carolers against Israel); and so on and on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.”

These apostates have emerged at a time that Alexander considers the most dangerous for Jews since the Holocaust. Especially in Europe, which Alexander labels the “dark continent,” laws that discriminate against Jews and violence against Jews has become commonplace: “For several years now, primarily in Germany but also in other European countries, the campaigns against circumcision (‘bodily mutilation’ or ‘violation of the rights of children’) and kosher slaughter (‘cruelty to animals’) have been gaining ever-wider support, and this among people who show no concern whatever about tonsillectomy or the way in which lobsters are killed.” Six months ago, Israel’s response to Hamas bombings “brought tens of thousands of violent, often murderous, anti- Jewish rioters into the streets of London, Belfast, Paris, Oslo, Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Berlin. . . . {T}here were larger demonstrations in support of Hamas in European cities than in any Arab capital.”

The attack on the kosher shop in Paris last month was hardly an isolated incident: “French Jewry, the largest Jewish community in the European Union, is now rapidly shrinking as a result of the country’s intense and frequently violent antisemitism, emanating not only from Muslim ‘activists,’ but from all parts of the political spectrum in the land of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—or Death’ . . . Michel Gurfinkiel, writing in the Jewish Chronicle (June 27, 2014), predicted French Jewry’s rapid decline, by the end of 2014, from half a million to 400,000. French Jewish immigration to Israel now approaches 6,000 to 7,000 annually, and emigration to other countries is also rising rapidly.” 

Whatever reservations, philosophical and political, one might have about Zionism and the state of Israel, the current situation of Europe is alarming, and the final result may be more alarming still. Alexander quotes Roger Cukierman’s comment that “Jews will leave in large numbers and France will fall into the hands of either Shari’a Law or the National Front.”