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Europe has spent years congratulating itself on becoming too enlightened for its old demons. The old hatreds, we were told, belonged to a darker age: church prejudice, blood-and-soil nationalism, crude ethnic chauvinism, all safely archived in museums and memorial culture. Modern Europe would be different. Liberal. Secular. Therapeutic. Post-tribal. Above all, tolerant.

And yet here we are again, with Jews across Europe reporting that open Jewish life feels risky, visibility feels costly, and public confidence in their safety has eroded badly. The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights found in its 2024 survey that antisemitism remains a reality for many Jewish people in the EU and that most feel unable to live openly Jewish lives. The agency’s 2026 follow-up stated it even more starkly: Jewish people in the EU face antisemitism on a “nearly constant basis.”

That is the irony. Europe built an entire moral identity around remembering the Jewish catastrophe, and yet in large parts of Europe it has become normal again for Jews to calculate where to wear a kippah, whether to hide a Star of David, and which neighbourhoods are best avoided. The continent has mastered the liturgy of remembrance while struggling with the elementary duty of protection.

The preferred story, of course, is that the danger must still come from the approved villains of European memory: the nationalist brute, the Christian reactionary, the provincial right-wing throwback with too much history and not enough sociology. Sometimes it does. The far right remains real, and in Germany, for example, Reuters reported in June 2025 that the watchdog RIAS recorded 8,627 antisemitic incidents in 2024, nearly double the 4,886 recorded in 2023, and that far-right offenders were responsible for around three times as many incidents as Islamists. That fact matters, and serious people should not airbrush it away for narrative convenience.

But that is not the whole story, and everyone knows it is not the whole story.

“Europe still loves Jews in theory, in memory, in curriculum, in the high-church ceremony of remembrance days. It is the living, visible, inconvenient Jew who keeps committing the unforgivable sin of existing in public.”

What liberal Europe finds harder to admit is that some of the antisemitism now making Jewish life more precarious arrives under the cover of other sacred commitments: multicultural innocence, asylum romanticism, anti-colonial theatre, imported sectarian fury, and elite cowardice dressed up as nuance. The old hatred has not vanished. It has diversified. It now marches under more than one banner. It can wear a bomber jacket, a keffiyeh, or a university lanyard. It can quote medieval slanders or postcolonial jargon. It can shout in the street or whisper in institutional euphemism.

That is what makes the present moment so revealing. Europe did not abolish prejudice. It changed the etiquette around which prejudices could be named plainly. It became exquisitely skilled at denouncing the safe forms of antisemitism, especially the dead ones, while growing clumsy, evasive, or selectively blind toward the live ones.

So the spectacle becomes almost comic in its hypocrisy. Politicians attend Holocaust memorials by day and govern societies by night in which Jews are advised to be discreet. Institutions publish statements about inclusion while Jewish students need security. Commentators deliver lectures on democratic values while treating Jewish fear as awkward, politically inconvenient, or in need of contextualization. Europe still loves Jews in theory, in memory, in curriculum, in the high-church ceremony of remembrance days. It is the living, visible, inconvenient Jew who keeps committing the unforgivable sin of existing in public.

The deepest irony may be this: a civilization that prides itself on tolerance has become so attached to its self-image that it cannot honestly describe the forms of intolerance now flourishing inside its own borders. And when a society cannot name a problem because naming it would embarrass its governing myths, the problem does not disappear. It metastasizes.

A decent society does not prove its virtue by hosting remembrance days, curating moral vocabulary, or posting the correct slogans after each outrage. It proves its virtue when Jews can walk its streets without calculation. Europe remembers what happened. Good. It should. But remembrance that does not cash out in ordinary public safety is beginning to look less like moral seriousness than civilizational vanity.

References

European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Jewish People’s Experiences and Perceptions of Antisemitism (11 July 2024). Survey overview and key findings page.

European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Monitoring and recording antisemitism in the EU – State of play and ways forward (27 January 2026). Overview and introduction page.

Reuters, “Antisemitic incidents in Germany almost double in 2024, report says” (4 June 2025).

Raymond Ibrahim, “The Irony of Europe’s Antisemitism Problem — Jewish Safety, Migration, and a Failed Narrative,” Hungarian Conservative (21 January 2026). Used here as thematic inspiration rather than as a primary evidentiary source.