Three weeks after her electoral victory of May 1979, Margaret Thatcher lauded “the very qualities (…) Jews have always cherished.” Self-help, hard work, and “reverence for education” were not only characteristics the long-time Member of Parliament for Finchley had observed among her north London Jewish constituents. These traits also dovetailed with the core principles of the Thatcher revolution: the new prime minister brought to Downing Street a philosemitism tailored to her conservative philosophy. What Thatcher called “the Jewish way of life” exemplified the Victorian middle-class ethics she championed against the welfare state. In 1986, Britain’s Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits claimed that according to Judaism “cheap labor is more dignified than a free dole”: This controversial statement only validated Thatcher’s pro-Jewish sentiments.Footnote ¹ Predicated in her own words on “Judeo-Christian values,” esteem for Israel, and admiration for imputed Jewish morals, her lifelong Judeophilia contrasted with the mild Judeophobic snobbery still traceable among Tory grandees. Commenting on the presence of Jews within Thatcher’s inner circle, the former Conservative prime minister Harold McMillan remarked that there were “more Estonians in the cabinet than Etonians.” But from 1979 to 1990, supporters of the Iron Lady approvingly pronounced Judaism “the new creed of Thatcherite England.”Footnote ² This positive image continued to inhabit the Tory mind decades after the end of the Thatcher era. “So many Jewish values are conservative values and British values too,” Liz Truss told a Manchester synagogue in August 2022. On the eve of her ephemeral premiership, she extolled once again the “Jewish family unit” and its purported ethics of self-reliance and entrepreneurship.Footnote ³

Neoliberalism in post-1979 Britain not only pushed philosemitism to the right. The new era also consecrated the whiteness of Jews in British race politics. “People are really afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture,” Thatcher declared a year before her election. Anglo-Jews, in her mind, unquestionably belonged to a primordial nation fearful of onslaught on “the British character [which] had done so much for democracy, for law, and (…) throughout the world.” Long suspicious of the “race relations industry,” an increasing number of Jewish voters responded in kind: Their migration from the Labour party to Conservatism both stemmed from socioeconomic factors and agreement with Thatcherite monoculturalism.Footnote ⁴ Immanuel Jakobovits’s views reflected this new orientation. Afro-Caribbeans, lamented the Chief Rabbi with the urban riots of 1981 and 1985 still in mind, wanted to give British society a “multi-ethnic form.” While sympathetic to the hardships of the underclass, Jakobovits advised inner-city Blacks to learn from past Jewish experiences. In London’s East End, he reminded them, Jewish immigrants lifted themselves out of poverty and integrated into the host culture.Footnote ⁵ It is no surprise that the prime minister cultivated a friendship with the Orthodox rabbi upon whom she bestowed the peerage in 1988: Sir Immanuel exemplified unique affinities between Englishness and Jewishness. Thatcher, of course, did not describe unity in the language of racial kinship. But the British-Jewish symbiosis dear to her heart confirmed the position of Anglo-Jews at the heart of white Britain. Jewish communal leaders, for their part, never proclaimed Jews white. Yet faithful to its Anglophile tradition, the Board of Deputies resisted ethnicization. Britain’s Jews stood ready to help discriminated non-whites, the representative body had already stated in the late 1960s, but they did not constitute a distinct racial group. During the Thatcher years, only young Jewish leftists allied with antiracist activists advocated the alignment of Anglo-Jews with Britain’s ethnic minorities.Footnote ⁶

Claiming Jewish difference across the Channel did not require similar radicalism. Elected president in May 1981, François Mitterrand ushered an era of cultural pluralism in traditionally assimilationist France: not a multiculturalism of separate communities but “the right to be different” in an otherwise integrationist republic. Jewish particularism, of course, had already burst into the French public sphere in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War. But the arrival of the Union of the Left to power encouraged young French Jews to embrace identity politics in alliance with the daughters and sons of Maghrebi immigrants. The creation of SOS Racisme in 1984 cemented this coalition. Under the umbrella of the socialist-dominated antiracist organization, Jewish students and second-generation North Africans affirmed their religious or cultural distinctiveness while jointly fighting antisemitism and xenophobia. This partnership, however, foundered at the end of the 1980s. Although both sides claimed that “we cannot solve the Israel-Palestinian problem on the banks of the Seine,” Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987 drew a wedge between Jews often critical of Israel yet affectively Zionists, and pro-Palestinian youths of Arab immigrant background. The “problem” of Islam, above all, fractured Jewish-Muslim interethnicity. During the first “scarf affair” of 1989, SOS Racisme still defended the right of Muslim girls to wear the hijab in public schools. But as the question of Islam’s compatibility with national identity travelled from the far-right to the mainstream, the simultaneous representation of Jews as models of civic integration, and of Muslims as problem minority, entered public discourse.Footnote ⁷ Exemplar Republicans in France, ideal neo-Victorians in Britain, or custodians of untainted kultur in the West German philosemitic imagination: Various iterations of model Jews already circulated before the end of the Cold War. Three decades later, postcolonial critics named this phenomenon “state philosemitism,” a phrase connoting the cooptation of “white” Jews in the national project at the expense of racialized Arabs, Muslims, or Palestinians.Footnote ⁸

The 1980s, however, also witnessed the emergence of postnational philosemitism: Jews – yet again – as litmus test of European cosmopolitanism. The modish rediscovery of Central Europe “as an idea, a state of mind, a worldview” helped vehiculate this trope.Footnote ⁹ With his much-discussed essay first published in French in 1983, Milan Kundera almost single-handedly sparked a Western intellectual romance with Mitteleuropa. “The tragedy of Central Europe,” argued the Czech writer established in France since 1975, was its separation from Europe’s consciousness after 1945. The Soviets absorbed the region into Eastern Europe while the West ignored its disappearance. Despite communist oppression, “small nations between Germany and Russia” remained Europe’s spiritual center.Footnote ¹⁰ Kundera’s melancholic ruminations, however, were also an ode to Jewish Central Europe. “No other part of the world,” he observed, “has been so deeply marked by the influence of Jewish genius.” This was not only a tribute to the Jewish writers, composers, or artists who prior to the Holocaust disproportionately contributed to modernist culture. “Aliens everywhere and everywhere at home,” added Kundera, “the Jews in the twentieth century were the principal cosmopolitan, integrating element in Central Europe.” His warm feelings for Jews stemmed in part from the identification of Czech dissidents with a twin “small nation.”Footnote ¹¹ But the novelist above all paid homage to vanished Jewish cosmopolitans: Premised on culture instead of borders, the Jews’ portable identity was the “condensed version” of Central Europe’s spirit.

Kundera, to be sure, offered readers particularly admirative in Paris a mythical Mitteleuropa devoid of antisemitic and authoritarian traditions. Many received license to imagine the former Habsburg lands as a lost paradise of cultural diversity.Footnote ¹² The influential essay nonetheless reshaped their mental map of the continent. Europe’s civilizational heart, they learned, was its geographical core. The rediscovery of “arch-European Europe” also meant the rediscovery of quintessential Europeans: The Jews who made Central Europe “a culture or a fate.” Admittedly, Kundera’s “love for the Jewish heritage” did not include the teachings of the Tora or the Yiddish-speaking world. Yet his idealization of Jewish cosmopolitanism inverted the vilification of Jewish wanderers alien to Europe – and the demonization of “rootless cosmopolitans” common to Nazism and Stalinism. Kundera also distanced himself from postmodern adulation of Jewish nomads “whose Being-together depends not on the authenticity of any primary roots.”Footnote ¹³ His remarkable Jews belonged to Central Europe: Their virtue was not nomadism but their role as cultural cement.

The Czech writer, however, succumbed to romanticization. What attracted him to Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, or Bruno Schultz, was not their alienness “everywhere” but their capacity to feel “everywhere at home.” Enthralled by Jews without borders, Kundera glossed over the tragic side of their predicament. For his heroes, as for assimilated Jewish intellectuals across Mitteleuropa, embracing Europe was less a “Jewish” disposition than a flight from outsideness – an escape to a cosmopolitan world still primarily composed of Jews.Footnote ¹⁴ Like Kundera, Hannah Arendt had earlier noted that the “fatherland” of early twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals was Europe, “something that could be said of no other group.” But their universalism unmoored from Jewishness was only “self-deception,” argued Arendt, not the noblest form of European identity.Footnote ¹⁵ Kundera’s “Kidnapped West” nonetheless inserted Jewish memory into liberal visions of Europe’s future. To imagine supranationalism was to think of supranational Jews; to envision a pluralistic community required valorization of the Jewish cosmopolitan experience.Footnote ¹⁶ In a lecture delivered in Jerusalem in 1985, the Czech émigré went one step further: Not only dead Central European Jews but Israel itself was “the true heart of Europe – a peculiar heart located outside the body.” The Israeli state, in Kundera’s eyes, was neither supremacist nor ethnonational, but the heir of cosmopolitan Europe in the Middle East.Footnote ¹⁷

The transition from the Common Market to the European Union, however, proceeded without fantasies of Jewish Mitteleuropa. Jacques Delors, president of the European Commission between 1985 and 1995 and the last pioneer of continental integration, rightfully called himself a “militant European.” Yet his dream was not cosmopolitanism but federalism. “The joint exercise of sovereignty,” declared the French social democrat in 1989, was the best antidote to nationalism, not “a conspiracy against the nation-state.”Footnote ¹⁸ Stefan Zweig’s pre-Holocaust cosmopolitan enthusiasm – “To me the greatness of Judaism is to be supra-national” – or George Steiner’s more recent idealization of Central European Jewish intellectuals as Europe’s lost leaven, had no bearing on Delors’s roadmap to the 1992 Maastricht Treaty.Footnote ¹⁹ For the visionary but technocratic policymaker, the “quantum leap” from economic community to the European Union necessitated the removal of internal barriers and “the principle of subsidiarity,” not conversion to Jewish Europeanness. Fifteen years later, however, this idea had made its way into official EU pronouncements. “We can learn a lot from the history of the Jews of Europe,” declared the European Commission president Romano Prodi in 2004. “New Europeans,” explained the center-left Italian politician, “are just starting to learn the complex art of living with multiple allegiances.” But Jews, “the first, old Europeans,” have been forced “to master this art since antiquity.”Footnote ²⁰ They now offered the EU a model to emulate: “the values that have guided them through the centuries have provided a reference for us.” To become European, in this logic, was to become allegorically Jew.

Speaking in Brussels at a seminar on antisemitism, Prodi may not have realized that his praise for “Europe’s archetypal minority” still positioned Jews as outsiders. Without mentioning Muslims, he also implied that other minorities should imitate Jews in order to belong to Europe. Yet his remarks above all exemplified the entanglement of Euro-optimism with philosemitism at the start of the twenty-first century. This moment coincided with the peak of Europeanist self-celebration: the ever-enlarging EU as a postnational peace project, a success story of democratic rule and human rights, “a union of diversity where differences are accepted and perceived as enriching the whole.”Footnote ²¹ This triumphant account presupposed that the European idea was now civic/universalist and no longer ethnic/cultural. Such confidence precluded consideration of a less flattering option: the EU as a regional project of “Eurowhiteness” blind to Eurocentrism, oblivious of colonial crimes, and a fortress against Islam.Footnote ²² To the contrary, prominent advocates of “new cosmopolitanism” at the start of the twenty-first century imported Euro-optimism into the intellectual sphere. After pleading for a postnational Germany grounded on constitutionalism and democracy, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas saw in the EU the template for a global “postnational constellation.” More measured, the sociologist Ulrich Beck portrayed Maastricht Europe as the successful reconciliation between universalism and difference. The cosmopolitan outlook, summarized Beck, was not a substitute for rootedness, but “a break with the hallowed principle of sovereignty.”Footnote ²³

Contrary to Kundera, Habermas and Beck did not designate Jews as palimpsests of postnationalism. However, the fact that turn-of-the-century German thinkers became Europe’s leading theorists of cosmopolitanism was not incidental. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, they simultaneously witnessed the explosion of “remembrance culture” in their country and the Europeanization of Holocaust memory enshrined in the 2000 Stockholm Declaration.Footnote ²⁴ In the ivory tower or among EU officials, Europe’s cosmopolitan self-image was the product of recent baptism. At the end of the Cold War, Holocaust remembrance became the birth certificate of a new Europe confident in victory over nationalism, antisemitism, and racism. The memory of colonialism played little role in the rebranding of “the idea of Europe” as cosmopolitan project. Although central-western European states shared a common history of rule on foreign lands, the critical reevaluation of colonialism only occurred – at best – at the national level. Reckoning with ill-digested imperial history, let alone with colonial crimes, had no place in the project of unified European memory.Footnote ²⁵ Although a postcolonial turn became noticeable in national historiographies after 2000, the critical memorialization of the colonial past still remained in its infancy at the level of EU institutions.Footnote ²⁶

The Holocaust, on the other hand, was now “seared in the consciousness of Europe.” The landmark European Parliament resolution of January 27, 2005, also declared that “the crimes committed at Auschwitz must live on in the memory of future generations.”Footnote ²⁷ In his 2004 remarks, Romano Prodi assured his audience that Holocaust consciousness had long been part of the European project. “The horror of the Shoah and the terrible loss of life caused by the Second World War,” he observed, “deeply marked Europe’s founding fathers too.” The Treaty of Rome (1957), however, promoted reconciliation and economic integration in response to World War II yet without reference to the annihilation of Jews. Although Konrad Adenauer signed the 1952 Reparations Agreement, his fellow Christian Democrat founding fathers yearned for “an ever-closer union of the peoples of Europe” while keeping – if not by keeping – the Holocaust at bay. The European Union “anti-Holocaust club,” by contrast, turned the memory of Jewish extermination into its “foundational past,” its “civil religion” or its paradigmatic lieu de mémoire (“site of memory”): Scholars have offered various turns of phrases to capture the European sacralization of Jewish victims at the end of the Cold War.Footnote ²⁸

The moral halo of the Holocaust, critics have since argued, also served as “moral alibi” for NATO and American military interventions, subjected Jews to a “new grammar of otherness,” impoverished politics in favor of apolitical empathy, and magnified the Final Solution at the expense of colonial crimes. But whether the start of confrontation with historical responsibility, or the presage of Holocaust fundamentalism, the inscription of the Jewish genocide into Europe’s core identity fast-tracked philosemitism after 1989. To be sure, the portrayal of Jews as “archetypal” friends; the European Union’s official anti-antisemitism; or a sympathetic view of Israel as extension of cosmopolitan Europe, were also reactions to a threatening “Muslim Question.” Euro-skeptics, including far-right parties and anti-immigrant populists, soon “loved” Jews against Islam with their own vocabulary. Philosemitism met Islamophobia in the course of the 1990s, yet a “surfeit of memory” first enabled its acceleration: the consecration of the Shoah as “the very definition and guarantee of the continent’s restored humanity.”Footnote ²⁹

“In Remembrance Lies the Secret of Redemption”

For Jewish observers of this historic moment, the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, raised fears of antisemitism more than hopes of philosemitism. “I cannot hide the fact that the Jew in me is troubled, even worried,” wrote Elie Wiesel on October 17.Footnote ³⁰ The desecration of 327 Jewish cemeteries in Germany between October 1990 and the summer of 1992 vindicated his pessimism. Although Third World asylum seekers, refugees from Eastern Europe, and Turkish guest workers bore the brunt of neo-Nazi violence, antisemitic incidents soared in the aftermath of German reunification. Few Jews were physically harmed during a wave of hate crimes predominantly committed in the Eastern states between 1990 and 1993. Yet extreme rightists and skinhead youths made no secret of wishing both “foreigners and Jews out.” Large crowds, in response, marched against xenophobia and racism. Yet in November 1992, the writer of Jewish descent Ralph Giordano penned an open letter informing chancellor Helmut Kohl that Jews in Germany had no choice but to prepare for armed self-defense.Footnote ³¹

The 1989 “turning-point,” however, elicited above all fears of Holocaust amnesia. The normalization of German history had been since 1982 the central theme of Kohl’s national narrative. The Federal Republic learned the lessons of the past, the Christian Democrat chancellor told his Israeli hosts in 1984, but the “grace of late birth” and their vibrant democracy now dispensed Germans from guilt. A year later, Kohl’s tribute to fallen Wehrmacht and SS soldiers at the Bitburg cemetery in the company of Ronald Reagan confirmed his determination to free the nation from the stigma of Nazism. The chancellor, however, diffused the Bitburg controversy by mending ties with American Jewish organizations and Jews in Germany.Footnote ³² Although the president of the Bundestag Philipp Jenninger delivered an embarrassing speech on the same occasion, Kohl’s commemoration of Kristallnacht on November 9, 1988, included acknowledgment of “deep shame” and thankfulness for the “precious” but “fragile” presence of Jews in the Federal Republic.Footnote ³³ During his visit of Auschwitz on November 14, 1989, Kohl recognized that “unspeakable hurt was inflicted on various peoples here, but above all on European Jews, in the name of Germany”: an evocation of Jewish victims absent from Helmut Schmidt’s remarks at the site in 1977. A few days after the fall of the Wall, Kohl still signaled that the new Germany in the making had not stepped out of Hitler’s shadow.Footnote ³⁴

Proclaimed on October 3, 1990, reunification potentially rid the resurgent nation from the burden of ritualized penitence. The sudden transformation of Germany into Europe’s most populous and prosperous country offered a tempting opportunity: the celebration of a healthy national history unencumbered by excessive Jewish memory. In his televised address, Kohl now only made passing reference to Germany’s criminal past. He instead announced that “united Europe is our future.” It befell on the Easterner Lothar de Maizière to remind revelers in Berlin that “the murder of six million Jews and many other Nazi crimes (…) weighs heavily on us.”Footnote ³⁵ But like the prominent critics of unification Günther Grass and Jürgen Habermas, Jewish commentators in Germany, the United States, and Israel worried about the future of Holocaust memory. National revival, they feared, could rapidly reduce Auschwitz to a forgettable aberration. Surveys of public opinion justified their concerns. In late 1990, 65 percent of West Germans believed that their country had sufficiently atoned for Nazi crimes. Most citizens of the Federal Republic felt ashamed that “Germans committed so many crimes against the Jews,” revealed an opinion poll from January 1992, but as in the past they also wished to “close the file” on this dark episode. About 42 percent still believed that Nazism had its good and bad sides.Footnote ³⁶ Foreign observers of the German cultural scene nevertheless noted “a fascination for things Jewish” at the dawn of the 1990s. “The Jewish past has become almost folkloric, a lost paradise,” cautioned the Dutch-American writer Ian Buruma in 1992. Contrary to previous philosemitic fads, countered the more optimistic American scholar Jack Zipes, Jews in Germany were no longer passive objects of exoticization. They now drew positive attention thanks to a distinctive minority culture created on their own terms. Yet the leading historian of West German philosemitism saw clouds on the horizon. “The philosemitic barriers cautiously accepted by the German intellectual mainstream for so many decades,” wrote Frank Stern in 1991, “are now eroding.” Others did not hesitate to conclude that “the official philosemitism of the postwar era came to an end on November 9, 1989.” For the German Jewish intellectual Mischa Brumlik, philosemitism was already extinct since “the obscene ritual at Bitburg.”Footnote ³⁷

Admittedly, the “new uninhibitedness” toward Jews within the conservative right, already palpable during the Historians’ Debate (1986–88), suggested that Holocaust exculpation was no longer taboo in the public domain. The dissolution of the German Democratic Republic was also an invitation for the so-called New Right to balance the memory of the Nazi past against the crimes of state socialism.Footnote ³⁸ On the left, the fall of the Berlin Wall encouraged intellectuals or politicians to shy away from Jürgen Habermas’s constitutional patriotism – a postnational identity grounded on the permanent repudiation of Nazism. “Self-confidence and pride from one’s own history,” the SPD leader Peter Glotz had already countered in 1986, were equally important.Footnote ³⁹ In the first half of the 1990s, however, Helmut Kohl’s memorialization initiatives best exemplified the postunification longing for affirmative history. Inaugurated in 1994, the Museum of the Federal Republic in Bonn recounted the success story of democratic West Germany. Opened in 1993, the Central Memorial for the Victims of War and Tyranny in Berlin paid tribute to fallen Wehrmacht soldiers, POWs, civilian victims, German expellees, and Jews. Neither museum ignored the Holocaust but one used the genocide to highlight the redemption of post-1945 Germany. The other lumped perpetrators and victims within a unified narrative of suffering. Both celebrated the restoration of Germany as a normal nation. In the early 1990s, the acceptance of the Holocaust as cornerstone of the German political culture looked like an unrealistic prospect.Footnote ⁴⁰

Yet the end of German division breathed new life into Holocaust memorial culture. In the East, the disappearance of the GDR spelled the demise of ideological antifascism. In the West, the end of the Cold War eroded the salience of “totalitarian theory” which between 1945 and 1989 allowed democratic Germans to frame Nazism as a mere variant of modern dictatorship: The birth of a unified state in 1990 opened a new space of national remembrance.Footnote ⁴¹ Normalizers, of course, continued to challenge the “guilt-obsession” of left-leaning intellectuals. But at the high levels of state or within educational or cultural institutions, Holocaust “historicization” and “relativization” never gained the upper hand. Kohl yearned for a usable past no longer dominated by Nazism, but under his administration the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial Site opened its doors in 1992. Plans were also made to turn Berlin’s The Topography of Terror into a permanent museum and documentation center.Footnote ⁴² In 1993, Kohl voiced support for the construction of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin – a project hotly debated since the late 1980s and inaugurated in 2005. No electoral benefit could be expected from this stance. In 1994, 46 percent of CDU/CSU voters considered the Holocaust “irrelevant today” and 43 percent disapproved of plans for a Holocaust memorial.Footnote ⁴³

Yet aware that Germany’s image in the US-dominated West depended on its engagement with the memory of Nazi crimes, Kohl recognized that the Americanization of the Holocaust ongoing since the late 1970s compelled the reunified state to turn the genocide into its central reference point.Footnote ⁴⁴ The positive reception of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) likewise revealed the impact of American cultural exports on the German psyche. Unbothered by criticism, Goldhagen declared all “ordinary Germans” who lived between the late nineteenth century and 1945 contaminated by “eliminationist antisemitism.” A predominantly young public enthusiastically embraced his thesis. But the “Goldhagen effect” also extended the distance between genocidal Germans and their democratic successors. During his media-hyped book tour, the American scholar reassured packed audiences that they were not “obligated to feel tormented by the past.” The “antagonist,” observed the Israeli writer Amos Elon, simultaneously played the role of “liberator.”Footnote ⁴⁵

The novelist and public intellectual Martin Walser, to be sure, did not see any liberation in Holocaust remembrance. In a notorious speech delivered in October 1998, the renowned intellectual compared Holocaust commemoration to a “moral cudgel” whose only function was the eternal shaming of Germans. Memory and guilt, argued Walser, were better left to private conscience. The standing ovation he received confirmed that many educated elites shared this sentiment.Footnote ⁴⁶ Competing memories of German suffering – from victims of Allied bombings to ethnic German expellees – likewise challenged the central place of Jewish victims in official remembrance. But at the end of a long chancellorship initially premised on historical conservatism, Helmut Kohl changed course in 1998. Among other incentives, the Americanization of the Holocaust in the age of post-Cold War US hegemony required from reunified Germans to make the memory of the crime the “core of our self-concept as a nation.”Footnote ⁴⁷ His successor Gerhard Schröder, head of the Red-Green coalition from 1998 to 2005, reaffirmed this point of view. “No one can excuse himself by claiming the grace of the late birth,” he announced after his electoral victory.Footnote ⁴⁸ Contrary to his Green foreign minister Joschka Fisher, Schröder adhered to a left-wing nationalism always aspiring to German normality. Yet at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the towering status of the Holocaust in official memory was solidly entrenched. “Remembrance of the war and the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis,” Schröder declared a few months before ceding power to Angela Merkel, “is part of our national identity.” Even before the radicalization of philosemitism during the Merkel era, the explosion of remembrance culture in the 1990s had already transformed Germans into “memory world champions.”Footnote ⁴⁹

The institutionalization of Holocaust commemoration combined both progressive and conservative aspects. On the one hand, remembrance culture vindicated the left-wing liberal intellectuals who during the 1980s challenged the normalizing impulse. The proliferation of state-sponsored Holocaust memory initiatives in schools, museums, and archives also built upon the grassroot memory activism of the preceding decade. On the other hand, the ritualization of commemoration potentially voided “working through the past” of its self-critical dimension. Academic research on the Holocaust blossomed in the 1990s, but the devolution of ceremonial atonement to politicians and dignitaries allowed large segments of the public to remain indifferent. Remembrance culture, concurred scholars of German memory, fostered both Betroffenheit (“show of concern”) and detachment.Footnote ⁵⁰ The contrarian Jewish publicist Henryk Broder was more dismissive. Ritualized mourning, he already charged in the mid 1980s, allowed Germany to recover national pride: a self-serving Sündenstolz or “pride in confessing one’s sin.”Footnote ⁵¹

The prioritization of the Holocaust in official memory, however, opened a new phase in the history of German philosemitism. The respectability of the Federal Republic always hinged on “reconciliation” with Jews domestically and abroad, as well as on special ties with Israel despite recurrent tensions. Yet the dependency of German absolution on Holocaust remembrance deepened after 1990. Richard von Weizsäcker’s landmark speech of May 8, 1985, had already announced this evolution. Three days after the controversial Bitburg commemoration, the President of Germany declared the surrender of the Third Reich a moment of “liberation.” Equally innovative was his plea for redemptive memory. Remembrance of the Jewish genocide, he implored, must become “a part of our very beings.” Often overlooked in commentaries of this notorious speech, however, is the mentoring role assigned to Jewish memory. “In remembrance lies the secret of redemption,” stated von Weizsäcker in reference to an adage attributed to the Hassidic luminary Baal Shem Tov. “The Jewish nation,” he added, “remembers and will always remember.” To redeem themselves, intimated the Christian Democrat head of state, Germans should remember like the Jews: The biblical command Zakhor (“Remember”) also obligated the descendants of Holocaust perpetrators.

The many Germans convinced that “grandpa was not a Nazi” easily ignored this injunction. But von Weizsäcker’s address revealed elite-level readiness to ground German morality on the memory of dead Jews. After reunification, however, official philosemitism also entailed the revitalization of Jewish life. In late 1990, the presidents of the sixteen Länder still opposed the mass immigration of Soviet Jews to the Federal Republic. Insensitive to traumatic memories, they instead sought the help of Jewish representatives to select “contingents” of suitable newcomers.Footnote ⁵² Yet after unanimous parliamentary approval, at least 170,000 Jewish “quota refugees” settled in Germany between 1990 and 2010.Footnote ⁵³ This special procedure, adopted while Kohl and conservatives otherwise claimed that “we are not a country of immigration,” reversed a key feature of migratory philosemitism since the Holocaust. While from 1945 to 1990 the West facilitated the collective relocation of Eastern European and Soviet Jews outside of Europe (in Israel or the United States), reunified Germany revived intracontinental Jewish migration. From the perspective of asylum law, fear of antisemitism in the ex-USSR justified the reception of Soviet Jews unwilling to live in Israel or unable to obtain American visas. Half-a-century after its murderous crusade against Judeo-Bolshevism, Germany was now the “protector of Jews in the East.”Footnote ⁵⁴

The “reforestation” of Jewish life in the reunified country, however, also accounted for liberal entry regulations. Imagined as replicas of disappeared German Jews, immigrants from the former Soviet Union were entrusted by the political class with the resurrection of German Judaism. In addition to its positive effect on Western public opinion, “expiatory demographic engineering” sought redemptive benefits from the revival of Jewish presence. It also legitimized a peculiar vision of the Holocaust as German self-victimization: the wound the nation inflicted upon itself when it forced out or murdered its upstanding Jewish citizens.Footnote ⁵⁵ The scant interest many Russian-speaking Jews showed for Jewish identity or religious observance, however, tempered hopes for the renaissance of the German-Jewish tradition. Yet by 2018, approximately 225,000 Jews affiliated and nonaffiliated with communities lived in Germany, while the conversion of non-Jews to Reform Judaism became a noticeable phenomenon. This was less than half than in 1933, but Germany now hosted the second largest Jewish population after France in the post-Brexit European Union. After remembrance culture transformed the Berlin Republic into a purported model of “coming to terms with the past,” the cultivation of a flourishing yet always “precarious” Jewish life also turned twenty-first-century Germans into world champions in “anti-antisemitism”: the protection of Jews from Muslim, Palestinian, and Jewish anti-Zionist “antisemitism,” the shielding of the Holocaust from comparability, and a fervent commitment to Israel’s security in the name of “reason of state.”

Moral dependency on Jewish death and Jewish life, however, was not only peculiar to post–Cold War German identity. From 1989 to the 2010 Eurozone financial crisis – the peak period of Euro-optimism – Holocaust memory and anti-antisemitism became twin pillars of philosemitism in the European Union. Yet like the new remembrance culture envisioned in Richard von Weizsäcker’s speech, the turn to Holocaust remembrance and anti-antisemitic governance in the European Union can also be traced to 1985. Released that year, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour film Shoah was only seen by artsy or intellectual audiences. Entirely based on oral testimonies of survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators, the austere documentary revolutionized the representation of the genocide on screen. It also popularized the Hebrew Shoah (“disaster”) in European terminology. The word’s rise to prominence, only fully apparent in the twenty-first century, was never absolute. “Holocaust” did not disappear from the lexicon and in Britain – as in the English-speaking world – the word retained its preeminence. In its official statements, the European Union continued to privilege “Holocaust” over “Shoah.” In post-Communist Eastern Europe, the Hebrew term likewise remained in limited use. But for the academics, memory activists, media professionals, or politicians who especially in France and Germany adopted the short and mysterious “Shoah,” naming the genocide in the (imagined) language of the victims not only asserted the uniqueness of their murder. It also reframed the German campaign of annihilation as “the attempt of one group of Europeans to exterminate every member of another group of Europeans, here on European soil.”Footnote ⁵⁶

The proliferation of anti-antisemitic watchdogs institutions within the European Union stemmed from the newly discovered Europeanness of the Jewish genocide: overcoming the European arch crime begged for sustained monitoring of “a very light sleeper.”Footnote ⁵⁷ By the end of the 1990s, anti-antisemitism took a more combative turn. For proponents of the term “new antisemitism” who conflated leftist and Muslim anti-Zionism with Judeophobia, hatred of Jews “ceased to be a socially marginal phenomenon.” In 2003, the French Jewish writer and media figure Alain Finkielkraut announced “a coming antisemitism” unseen in Europe since 1945.Footnote ⁵⁸ From the center-left to the conservative right, anti-antisemitism now occupied a prominent place in political discourse. For their own purposes, conservative populists and far-right extremists also embraced this rhetoric. The strengthening of anti-antisemitism in the European Union, however, was first prepared by a transnational “politics of regret”Footnote ⁵⁹: The spread of Holocaust repentance beyond Germany’s borders created a psychological space favorable to an intensified “war on antisemitism.”

The Atonement Cascade

Although always carefully worded, official expressions of national remorse for the Holocaust remained until the end of the Cold War an exclusive West German ritual. The central place of the Jewish genocide in post-1990 German memory only consolidated the status of the Berlin Republic as Europe’s “master atoner.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Others nonetheless joined the fray: Europe’s contribution to a burgeoning “age of apology” was to turn Holocaust contrition into the template for a (partial) politics of repentance in the West. The opening act of the atonement cascade, however, still took place on German soil. On April 12, 1990, the democratically elected East German parliament recognized the “immeasurable suffering” inflicted on Europeans by “Germans during the time of National Socialism.” More daring was the admission of responsibility “on behalf of the people for the humiliation, expulsion, and murder of Jewish women, men, and children”: The first unqualified confession of guilt by a European country since 1945 unexpectedly came from the socialist East. The GDR’s antifascist myth vanished with the state in 1990, but four decades of antifascist culture had nonetheless prepared reformists to accept full responsibility for the Holocaust. In the same statement, the Volkskammer also asked “Jews of the world to forgive us for the hypocrisy and hostility of East German policies towards Israel and also for the persecution (…) of Jewish citizens after 1945 in our country.”Footnote ⁶¹ Like the newborn Federal Republic after 1949, the ephemeral post-Communist East German government sought legitimation through philosemitism – and now penance for anti-Zionism. The mutation of socialist antifascism into Holocaust regret also set a precedent for the process of “democratic transition” in Eastern Europe. Critical examination of the past will not be demanded from former Soviet satellite states seeking membership in the European Union. But despite nationalist resistance and competing memories of Communist victimization, their “return to Europe” in 2004 and after will require at a minimum the payment of lip service to a key EU acquis communautaire or “common core”: homage to the singular Shoah as prerequisite to Europeanization.

Austria, to the contrary, could until the late 1980s envision entry in the European Union without modification of its foundational myth. The darling of the West during the Cold War, the neutral country clung since 1945 to its “victim thesis.” The doctrine initially affirmed Austria’s status as “first victim of Hitlerite aggression.” From the 1950s onward, it also connoted the patriotic sacrifice of Austrian soldiers and civilians “who only did their duty” under German rule. Both versions of the thesis, in any case, marginalized the role of Austrian Holocaust perpetrators and the persecution of Jews.Footnote ⁶² The outbreak of the Waldheim Affair in 1986, however, marked a turning point in Austria’s self-perception. Although the federal president accused of misrepresenting his Wehrmacht service enjoyed strong popular support, a network of dissenters (including Jewish activists no longer willing to serve as “alibi Jews of Austria’s national lie”) challenged the narrative of innocence.Footnote ⁶³ Only a predominantly young and progressive segment of the public took part in this grassroot counter-memory movement. Yet change was also perceptible at the level of high politics. On July 8, 1991, the socialist chancellor Franz Vranitzky issued the first non-German declaration of regret in post–Cold War Europe. “We acknowledge all aspects of our history,” Vranitzky stated, “but just as we claim the good ones, we have to ask forgiveness for the bad ones – among the survivors and the descendants of the dead.” The negative publicity generated by the Waldheim Affair undoubtedly accounted for this repentant tone. In June 1993, however, Vranitzky deepened his remorse during a visit of Israel, “a country whose people and destiny are so close to the hearts and minds of many Austrians.” In November 1994, his successor Thomas Klestil told the Knesset that “We Austrians recognize that the acknowledgment of the full truth is long overdue.”Footnote ⁶⁴

In 1995, Austria joined the European Union with an official remembrance culture no longer antithetical to that of guilty Germany. The reopening of Vienna’s Jewish Museum in 1993, the Holocaust monument inaugurated in Vienna’s Judenplatz in 2000, and a program of restitution of stolen Jewish property finalized in 2001, exemplified this convergence. Simon Wiesenthal’s new prestige likewise reflected this evolution. Recurrently vilified as vengeful Jew and defamer of the country since the 1960s, the renowned Nazi hunter became in the liberal press of the late 1990s “the consciousness of the nation,” the country’s Jewish guide to morality and truth.Footnote ⁶⁵ The strong showing of Jörg Haider’s far-right Freedom Party in the 1999 parliamentary elections, and its governmental alliance with conservatives until 2005, revealed the fragility of the post-innocence turn. Yet the protest culture born out of the Waldheim Affair grew into forceful opposition. The estimated 250,000 people who on February 19, 2000, filled Vienna’s Heldenplatz demonstrated above all against a “coalition with racism.” But the anti-Haider movement was not a return to old left antifascism. It signaled instead a generational shift in interpretations of the past. This was not only true of the young and left-leaning segment of civil society: In the early twenty-first century, the Shoah moved from the periphery to the center of official Austrian memory.Footnote ⁶⁶ As in Germany, the explosion of commemorative projects in Vienna and other cities after 2005 will be accompanied by heightened monitoring of “both existing and the new imported antisemitism,” in the words of Sebastian Kurz pronounced in Israel in 2018. Like Angela Merkel a decade earlier, the young center-right chancellor also committed his country to Israel’s security, “our moral obligation that is part of our Staatsräson [reason of state or national interest].”Footnote ⁶⁷ In Austria as in other EU member states, the liberal impulse initially behind the memorialization of the Shoah yielded distinctive forms of conservative – and far-right – pro-Israelism.

The gold standard of Holocaust remorse in post–Cold War Europe was set in France. Speaking at the anniversary of the 1942 Vel d’Hiv round up on July 16, 1995, Jacques Chirac’s recognized his country’s co-responsibility in the Final Solution. His address still distinguished between the “land of the Enlightenment and Human Rights” and the Vichy regime. Yet contrary to his predecessor François Mitterrand who always refused to “apologize in the name of France,” Chirac broke with exculpation. “A collective fault,” he acknowledged, the deportation of Jews was “backed up by French people and the French State.” In reunified Germany, the phrase “remembrance culture” pertained to the institutionalization of guilt and expiation. In France, devoir de mémoire (duty of memory) symbolized the new place of the Shoah in the national narrative.Footnote ⁶⁸ The expression began to circulate in the early 1970s, but Chirac’s speech revealed its hegemonic meaning in the mid 1990s. “To transmit the memory of the Jewish people (…) to bear witness again and again,” was now a new moral standard. The life-long Gaullist who nevertheless shied away from de Gaulle’s “resistancialist myth” did not speak in isolation. In late July 1995, 72 percent of the public approved of his declaration.Footnote ⁶⁹ Chirac’s successors, in turn, expanded the place of the Shoah in French memory. “There is nothing to add or remove from Jacques Chirac’s speech,” declared Nicolas Sarkozy at Paris’s Shoah Memorial in 2007. In the name of “transmission,” however, the conservative president proposed to pair every ten-year-old pupil with a Holocaust survivor (the project deemed potentially traumatic was ultimately aborted.) In 2012, François Hollande’s own Vel d’Hiv address was a trenchant admission of French responsibility. “The truth,” stated the one-term socialist president, “is that this crime was perpetrated in France, and by France.” Yet unlike Chirac, Hollande also declared the murder of European Jews “an enterprise without precedent and which cannot be compared to anything else.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The exceptionality of the crime was already the cornerstone of German atonement. Overcoming the “Vichy syndrome” in France likewise entailed affirmation of the Shoah’s incomparability: In both countries, the stage was set for a standoff between Holocaust and postcolonial memory.

Although directed at the French public, Chirac’s epoch-making speech also offered leaders of former German-occupied countries in Western Europe a template for public penance. Despite Denmark’s reputation as protector of Jews, the Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen apologized in 2005 for “the active cooperation of the Danish authorities” with German occupiers. That same year, the Dutch head of government Jan Peter Balkenende called the deportation of Jews a “pitch-black” chapter in the history of the Netherlands – a reference to collaboration and passivity departing from the cult of heroic Dutch rescuers. “We have to recognize [state collaboration] and say sorry,” similarly declared the Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt in 2007. The socialist premier Elio di Rupo sought “forgiveness” from the Belgian Jewish community in 2012. Collaborationist authorities “and through them the Belgian state,” he acknowledged, “were complicit in the most abominable crime.” Like Chirac before him, the Walloon socialist avowed an “unforgivable debt” and pledged “to do all I can to never let it fall into oblivion.”Footnote ⁷¹ No state-level apology for Belgian atrocities during the country’s rule over Congo had until then been issued.

The French devoir de mémoire migrated to the Low Countries but crossed the Alps with more difficulties. In July 2000, the Italian Parliament instituted a Day of Memory to be observed every year on the anniversary date of the liberation of Auschwitz (January 27, 1945). The event was to commemorate “the extermination and persecution of the Jewish people and of Italian political and military deportees in the Nazi camps.” The balancing of “Jewish” victimhood with “Italian” suffering distinguished Italian memory politics from Chirac’s exclusive attention to the Final Solution. The absence of the word “Fascism” from the language of the law was another singularity. Two years after the Vatican’s landmark “We Remember” declaration, the “Day of Memory” paid homage to Jewish victims, but alongside others and without designation of domestic perpetrators. For its critics, the project conveniently “de-Fascistized” the Shoah.Footnote ⁷² The law nonetheless specifically recognized “Italy’s persecution of its Jewish citizens,” a first official deviation from the “good Italian” myth. Although devoid of a unifying theme, the Day of Memory generated public discussions on Italy’s role in the Holocaust, a topic until then only addressed in scholarly studies of antisemitism under Mussolini. A project initiated in 2006 to commemorate Fascist crimes in Ethiopia and the Balkans, on the other hand, never materialized.Footnote ⁷³

In Britain, the first Holocaust National Day marked on January 27, 2001, showed that the incorporation of the Shoah into European civic calendars was not limited to the former satellite states of Hitler’s empire. “The Holocaust deserves a permanent place in our collective memory,” announced Tony Blair on that day. Although a striking departure from the marginal place of the Jewish genocide in British memory, Blair’s statement avoided Britain’s own historical relation to the Holocaust. The universal and dehistoricized Shoah, in the mind of the New Labour leader, was an invitation to “recommit (…) to the best, most decent values of humanity and compassion.” Blair made no mention of Britain’s “Late Victorian Holocausts” or its history of imperial violence: The Shoah remained the exclusive moral lesson for “the kind of society we believe in.” Two years later, the Holocaust as Western paradigm of atrocity also justified the export of “decent values” to the Middle East through British participation in the American-led invasion of Iraq.Footnote ⁷⁴

In July 2001, Alexander Kwasniewski’s address at the north-eastern Polish village of Jedwabne demonstrated that the Holocaust apology cascade also reached post-Communist Europe. During visits of Israel in 1995 and 1998, Lithuanian and Latvian heads of states had already expressed regret – before facing uproar at home. Issued in Poland, Kwasniewski’s powerful declaration was also a domestic acknowledgment of guilt. A year after the publication of Jan T. Gross’s Neighbors (published in Poland in 2000), the center-left president apologized “in the name of those Poles whose conscience is shattered by that crime.” In Jedwabne, he stated, “Polish citizens were killed at the hands of fellow citizens.” Like Kwasniewski, liberal politicians, academics, and journalists recognized that parts of the Polish population, while victimized by the Third Reich, also participated in the killing or persecution of Jews. On the seventieth anniversary of the pogrom (July 2011), Poland’s president Bronislaw Komorowski apologized again for the crime.

Polish reactions to Neighbors, however, epitomized a chasm between the politics of regret in Western Europe and in post-Communist states. Jan T. Gross’s bombshell provoked unprecedented soul-searching on violence committed by ethnic Poles against Jews during and after the war. The Jedwabne issue, however, divided liberals who remembered “to remember,” conservatives who remembered “to benefit,” and populists and nationalists who remembered “to forget.”Footnote ⁷⁵ As in other former communist states, Holocaust memory in Poland alternatively meant critical introspection, the start of a mutually beneficial relationship with Jews and Israel, or a tyrannical imposition of guilt on the martyred nation. Whereas the “Paxton effect” in France or the “Goldhagen effect” in Germany ultimately yielded elite consensus on remembrance culture or devoir de mémoire, the “Jan Gross effect” in Poland unleashed memory wars unseen in Western Europe after 1989. The right-wing populist Law and Justice party in power between 2015 and 2023 only widened the rift between patriotic memory and critical remembrance: For the guardians of the martyrdom narrative, the politics of regret was only a “pedagogy of shame,” when not a “crime against the Polish nation.”Footnote ⁷⁶

Polish responses to Neighbors from 2000 to 2015, and Law and Justice’s ideological war against revisionist historians during its eight-year rule, confirmed that the addition of Eastern members to the European Union did not easily translate into the “Europeanization of Holocaust memory.” Post-Communist states, to be sure, signed the 2000 Stockholm Declaration which singled out the Holocaust as a singular breach of civilization. They supported numerous European Parliament resolutions calling for Holocaust education and research at the continental level. In 2005, they recognized January 27 as “European Holocaust Memorial Day.” By 2015, most of the former peoples’ democracies had joined the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) founded in 2000.Footnote ⁷⁷ Although a prerequisite for EU membership, their gravitation toward Shoah memory was not a “zero hour” of Holocaust consciousness in the region. From 1945 to 1989, socialist antifascism did not hermetically suppress discussions of Jewish victimhood. Despite the insertion of the Holocaust into a scripted antifascist narrative, historians, artists, and writers carved out a space of memorialization in the communist bloc. In the wake of the 1989 revolutions, ethnonationalists resisted Jewish memory but pro-European liberals who grew in the shadow of antifascism did not always discover the Holocaust thanks to Western moral education. While buried under communist ideology until 1989, its memory was nonetheless kept alive in parts of the intelligentsia and dissident networks.Footnote ⁷⁸

Commitment to Holocaust remembrance, however, was also the prize to pay to commemorate “our own” suffering under Nazism and Communism. At the start of the twenty-first century, acceptance of the Shoah as foundational European event aligned the East with the West. But the post-Communist states who joined the European Union in 2004, 2007, and 2013, pursued their own mnemonic agenda. They either equalized the Shoah and Communist crimes, celebrated brave rescuers while forgetting complicity, or used the Jewish genocide to highlight other forms of victimization. The Holocaust undoubtedly entered Eastern Europe’s official memory culture after 1989, but governments retained control over the way in which it is “remembered, understood, and interpreted”: The project of unified Shoah memory resulted instead in memory divergence.Footnote ⁷⁹ Yet in East-Central Europe, the Balkans, and the Baltic States, the multiplication of Holocaust museums, research centers, and memorial sites also pointed to institutional convergence. Despite the conflation of “our suffering” with the Holocaust, or the prioritization of Communist oppression, the musealization of the Shoah in the former communist realm extended Western commemorative practices to the East. The “return to Europe” of post-Communist states did not elicit a consensus of regret across the former Iron Curtain: Enlargement to the East nonetheless bolstered the European Union’s “anti-Holocaust club.”Footnote ⁸⁰

Resurrecting the Jew?

The arrival of Shoah memory in Eastern Europe coincided with the emergence of grassroot “Jewish” revivalism in the region. The production and consumption of Jewish culture by predominantly non-Jews was already a phenomenon noticed in Germany after reunification. The Klezmer boom in Berlin during the 1990s, for instance, brought to life a musical genre foreign to the German Jewish experience yet marketed as authentically Jewish. The Klezmer wave also rolled through the former Yiddish-speaking East where the sound of Jewish music filled the void of absence.Footnote ⁸¹ In former centers of pre-Holocaust Jewish life, “virtual Jewishness” suddenly resuscitated the vanished Jewish past. Prague’s Old Town in the mid 1990s, observed then a Jewish-American visitor, oddly looked like a “Jurassic Park of Judaism (…) a circus of the dead.”Footnote ⁸² In Poland, Krakow’s historic Jewish quarter became a flourishing center of “Jewish” tourism. Hassidic figurines in souvenir shops, “Jewish” restaurants and cabaret artists, or street performers dressed as shtetl Jews, left an impression of kitsch and commercialism. Yet Poland’s non-Jewish “Jewish turn” amounted to more than commodification. For liberal revivalists, “resurrecting the Jew” through the learning of Yiddish and Jewish history, attendance of “Jewish” festivals, or the mapping of past Jewish sites, meant resisting Polish-Catholic ethnonationalism. Civic philosemitism did not prevent the Law and Justice party from securing a solid electoral majority in 2015. Since Jan T. Gross’s “shock therapy,” however, progressive actors defended the idea of secular and multicultural Polishness through “vicarious Jewishness” – their conduit to pluralist democracy.Footnote ⁸³

The arrival of Shoah memory in the European Union’s East not only elicited new forms of liberal engagement with “things Jewish.” It also added new “Jewish spaces” to a region which prior to 1989 looked like the graveyard of European Jewry. Beautified Jewish quarters or synagogues brought to life a “virtual” Jewish heritage. But the “return” of the Holocaust to East-Central Europe, pointed out the sociologist Diana Pinto in the mid 1990s, also produced “Jewish-friendly neutral spaces”: Jewish activities now taking place outside the Jewish world. Memorials, Jewish museums, and Jewish programs in universities, observed the French-Italian scholar, migrated from the Jewish sphere to civil society. Already in existence in the West but a novelty in the post-Communist East, such “friendly neutral spaces” carried out Jewishness to a wider public. Fifty years after the Holocaust, they signaled the mutation of Jews from “intrinsic foreigners” into “integral pieces, qua Jews, of an open European continent.”Footnote ⁸⁴

Other commentators tempered this enthusiasm. New meeting grounds between Jews and non-Jews emerged in post-1989 Europe, yet as the case of reunified Germany demonstrated, these “Judaizing terrains” also created “distortive imaginations of Jews.” From the same German vantage point, scholars countered in the early 2000s that “civil society does not yet acknowledge Jews’ entitlement to a distinct place in it (…) since the perpetrator’s side has not yet come to terms with their deeds.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Delivered in 2004, George Steiner’s remarks exemplified the persistence of lachrymosity after 1989. “Until Europe (…) comes to explicit terms with the long prehistory of the gas-ovens,” warned the distinguished Jewish intellectual, “many of the stars in our European firmament will continue to be yellow.”Footnote ⁸⁶

The age of Euro-optimism nonetheless gave ground to Jewish optimism. The Europeanization of the Shoah, and in Western Europe the breaking of taboos about complicity, pushed the memory of the crime from the Jewish realm to society at large. Despite unease with ritualistic expiation – “a way not to remember” for its fiercest criticsFootnote ⁸⁷ – the democratization of the Shoah fostered the normalization of Jewishness in the European Union. At the risk of lachrymose reprimand, Diana Pinto noted that twenty years after the end of the Cold War, “Jewish themes, references, and life now occupy center stage in ways that seemed unimaginable” during the first postwar decades. This was not just overcompensation. The chasm between “Europe” and “Jews” spectacularly narrowed after 1989: The Holocaust, as well as the pre-Holocaust Jewish past, were now officially shared by both sides.Footnote ⁸⁸ In the academic world, the expansion of Jewish history into national or European history testified of this proximity. Populated by Jewish and non-Jewish researchers alike, centers for Holocaust or Jewish history mainstreamed “Jewish” knowledge in universities – even if in Germany debates over ownership flared up when “Jewish studies without Jews” gained a foothold in the academic landscape.Footnote ⁸⁹ For the first time in its long trajectory, “the idea of Europe” now entailed the unproblematic presence of “Jews qua Jews” into pluralist democracy. In the early 2000s, Jewish advocates of the European project took notice of this friendly context. The “huge success” of the European Union, they felt, empowered Jews to identify “as Jews, Europeans, and for example British (…) without any conceptual or logical discomfort.”Footnote ⁹⁰

Yet a parallel discourse of “new antisemitism” poured cold water on Jewish confidence. Contrary to believers in improved conditions for European Jews, alarmists saw an existential threat in the “second great mutation of antisemitism in modern times, from racial antisemitism to religious anti-Zionism.”Footnote ⁹¹ The specter of “new Judeophobia,” however, reinforced philosemitism by drawing attention to Jewish vulnerability. On January 27, 2005, the European Parliament condemned “racist violence” on the continent, but “in particular and without reservations all acts or expressions of anti-semitism of whatever kind.” The rhetoric of resurgent antisemitism also affected the politics of friendship. In 1989, the victory of European liberalism elicited an epochal rapprochement between “the idea of Europe” and Jewishness: In the twenty-first century, hardline conservatives, right-wing populists, and far-right extremists also became stakeholders in Euro-philosemitism.

From New Antisemitism to New Philosemitism

Antisemitism, wrote in 2003 one of its prominent scholars, is always “old-new.”Footnote ⁹² But since the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban (July 2001), and the 9/11 attacks the United States, a network of academics, pundits, and members of watchdog organizations claimed that a “new” antisemitism was “rising from the muck.” The novelty of the phenomenon, argued its theoreticians, was the role of “collective Jew” assigned to the state of Israel by its radical opponents.Footnote ⁹³ For the prolific French scholar Pierre-André Taguieff, new antisemitism was better defined as “new Judeophobia.” Charging the Jewish state of “apartheid” or “genocide,” he contended, allowed “the denunciation of the ‘‘chosen people’’ as a people giving itself every right to dominate, conquer, oppress, and destroy.” The Zionism-is-Racism rhetoric, in which Israel stands as “the incarnation of absolute evil,” expunged antisemitism from the category racism: The path was allegedly clear for the normalization of anti-Jewish animus in antiracist ideology.Footnote ⁹⁴

In Taguieff’s own country, however, “new Judeophobia” did not permeate public opinion. To the contrary, French surveys conducted in the early 2000s showed an uptick in already predominantly favorable perceptions of Jews.Footnote ⁹⁵ Fifteen years into the twenty-first century, the Pew Research Center identified a similar trend in Western Europe – the supposed hotbed of “new” antisemitism while in Eastern Europe antisemitism revived old anti-Judaic, ethnonationalist, or anticommunist tropes.Footnote ⁹⁶ In France (92%), Britain (86%), Germany (80%), and Italy (71%), an overwhelming majority of respondents showed “a positive attitude towards Jews.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Similar results were obtained in Spain, although the American Defamation League was able to establish in 2015 that “eleven million Spaniards harbored antisemitic attitudes.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Yet in June 2015, the Spanish parliament passed a law enabling Sephardic Jews “descendants of those expelled from Spain in the 15th Century” to swiftly obtain citizenship. An identical bill had earlier come into effect in Portugal (there the ADL only counted 1.8 million antisemites). No similar invitation was extended to the descendants of Muslims driven out or who emigrated from the Iberian Peninsula after 1492. “Philosephardic” Spain and Portugal officially longed for the return of Jews, not that of Arabs.Footnote ⁹⁹

Despite apparent tolerance, monitors of antisemitism documented since the 2002 a steady rise in anti-Jewish vandalism, as well as verbal and physical attacks on Jews – an increase correlating with Israeli military operations in the West Bank and Gaza. In 2013, the Pew Research Center additionally found – although without precise quantification – that Jews experienced harassment “by individuals or social groups” in most member states of the European Union. Eighteen reports on antisemitism were issued by the Vienna-based European Monitoring Centre for Racism and Xenophobia (and its successor agency) from 2000 to 2022. They confirmed the coexistence of “positive views of Jews” with growing insecurity. From 2009 to 2019, for instance, Jews were the second group of people most readily accepted as potential neighbors or family members, just behind “disabled persons.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Britain ranked first in this category despite warnings from antisemitism scholars that the United Kingdom was “sleepwalking into a morass of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bigotry.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ In 2019, the Pew Research Center found again that “half of more of surveyed European countries have favorable views of Jews” – between 76 and 92 percent in Western Europe. Across the European Union, Muslims, refugees, and at the bottom of the scale Sinti and Roma, received significantly lower scores.Footnote ¹⁰²

Yet since the year 2002, data on hate speech and hate crimes revealed a steady rise in anti-Jewish acts including vandalism, online harassment, threats, and physical harm. Many additional cases were believed unreported. “The number of officially recorded incidents [2011–2021] is very low,” pointed out the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), yet this did not mean that “antisemitism is not present.” Lack of “systematic data collection,” added the watchdog organization, further skewed survey results. When taking into account the “experiences and perceptions” of European Jews, assessed the FRA in 2018, antisemitism was both “pervasive” and “normalized” across the EU – a conclusion that American Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and new antisemitism scholars had long reached without hesitation.Footnote ¹⁰³ Such discrepancy between reassuring polls and a rising sense of insecurity, explained defenders of the new antisemitism concept, was the peculiar trait of the Judeophobic wave. “Levels of antisemitism in Great Britain are among the lowest in the world,” acknowledged the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) in 2017. Yet “counting antisemites,” claimed the think-tank, was different from measuring “elastic” antisemitism. By this standard, “30% of British society” held at least “one antisemitic attitude.” The JPR did not hesitate to blame criticism of Israel for this discrepancy. “56% of the general population hold at least one anti-Israel attitude,” found its researchers; and “the stronger a person’s anti-Israel views, the more likely they are to hold antisemitic attitudes.” Scholars of new antisemitism expressed the same view differently. Although limited to “educated people who consider themselves to be politically radical and overrepresented among Muslim people,” a unique “ideological-political phenomenon” allegedly threatened Jewish existence in Europe.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ By designating the “Zio” as the enemy of human emancipation, exacerbating the “competition of victims” to deny the Shoah, and importing Judeophobia from the global south, “antiracist anti-Zionists” on one hand, and “Muslims” on the other, supposedly created “a growing sense of emergency.” In 1990, 500,000 French Jews and non-Jews had marched together after the desecration of the Carpentras Jewish cemetery. Although in 2006, demonstrations took place after the shocking murder of Ilan Halimi, French Jewish commentators noted that most participants were Jews (although government ministers, Christian and Muslim dignitaries, and politicians joined in). Since 2000, lamented the Jewish thinker Shmuel Trigano in 2015, Jews in France lived in “solitude.” David Badiel’s Jews Don’t Count would six years later convey a similar feeling in Britain.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ New antisemitism, summarized its decipherers, spelled the end of the philosemitic respite in Europe. “Taboos kept antisemitism in check in the post-Holocaust years,” but restraints “no longer seem to exercise the full protective power they once had.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Objectors to the new antisemitism thesis charged that the new Judeophobia panic “obscured the far more pressing reality of Islamophobia.” For some, Muslim immigrants were Europe’s new Jews; for others, antisemitism and Islamophobia remained distinct forms of racism despite their historical entanglement.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Yet while new antisemitism scholars proclaimed the return of Europe’s “Jewish question,” critics saw in this discourse a reflection of Europe’s “Muslim question.” Synonymous with Muslim antisemitism, new antisemitism reinforced the image of Muslim incompatibility with the European Union – the self-proclaimed antidote to antisemitism since 1992. While no less a threat to Jewish security, retorted analysts of the phenomenon, Judeophobia among Muslim youths expressed “a system of values and a cultural universe very different from those that formerly fed European anti-Semitism.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ To understand why in immigrant neighborhoods the Jew became a symbol of European or white hegemony and oppression of Palestinians required rigorous sociology, not hysteria over Jew-hating “Eurabia” or the presumed collective mind of Muslims. Antisemitism among youths of immigrant background argued the French sociologist Michel Wiewiorka, “arises from a logic of the ghetto (…) “and a deep sense of being rejected and trapped in a place of relegation.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Taking marginalization into account did not make Judeophobia less repugnant but helped situate the phenomenon within the realities or perceptions of social exclusion. If inattentive to other forms of racism, anti-antisemitism only remained “a pretext for discussing another object: Islam and its “rogue” forms.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

Challengers of new antisemitism ideology pointed to another diversionary tactic: the weaponization of antisemitism to stifle systemic criticism of Israel. Anti-Zionist discourse, as in the past, could always devolve into fantasies of Jewish world domination, hold all Jews responsible for Israel’s actions, or as in the case of the humorist Dieudonné in France, revel in grotesque Holocaust denial. But even if many of its theorists considered themselves liberal Zionists, new Judeophobia was also new Palestinophobia: the designation of categorical pro-Palestinianism as the main source of antisemitism in the West. Even before the popularity of the “from the river to the sea” slogan, accusations of war crimes, apartheid, settler colonialism, and racism leveled at Israel, as well as the Boycott, Divestment and Solidarity campaign, unsettled believers in the Oslo peace process – let alone hardline supporters of Israeli right-wing governments. No longer contained within the “left of the left,” asserted new antisemitism alarmists, anti-Zionism seeped into antiracism, anti-globalism, postcolonialism, neo-humanitarianism, or the Green movement: A threatening coalition which in alliance with predisposed Muslims allegedly declared open season on the “collective Jew,” and by extension on all Jews. In accordance with Natan Sharansky’s “3D-test” first advertised in 2004, new antisemitism ideologues, supported by Israeli officials and academics, responded by declaring anti-Zionism antisemitic when it engaged in “delegitimization, demonization, and double standards”: a bar flexible enough to permanently inject the question of antisemitism in debates on Israel-Palestine, and a “3D-test” never reversely applied to anti-Palestinian rhetoric.Footnote ¹¹¹ When “every anti-Zionist is an anti-Semite,” reminded an opponent of this stance, “the concept of anti-Semitism loses its significance.”Footnote ¹¹²

In Europe, however, new antisemitism ideology did not become unchallenged orthodoxy. “Old” ethnonationalist antisemitism was alive and well, especially in Eastern Europe, argued challengers of the new antisemitism concept. Anxieties over “new” anti-Jewish hostility, however, had more to do with “American, Israeli and Zionist discomfort with strong European criticism of Israeli policy than it has with actual antisemitism.”Footnote ¹¹³ Yet with the help of the Israeli government and think tanks, the American Jewish Committee, and the European Jewish Congress, the discourse of new antisemitism entered the realm of policymaking at the European Union level. Until 2016, to be sure, proponents of the new antisemitism paradigm lamented the EU’s “ritual posturing” which in their mind “elided” the true nature of the phenomenon.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Yet the EU had since its inception pledged to “combat” antisemitism under the general rubric of “racism and xenophobia.” After 2000, anti-antisemitism also became a distinct policy area within the European Commission, but also the OSCE and intergovernmental watchdog agencies.Footnote ¹¹⁵ “Governments have overcome their reluctance,” approvingly noted a contributor to this effort, “to separate anti-Jewish hatred from other forms of bigotry lest they be seen as creating victimhood hierarchies.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ The EU’s policy record nonetheless failed to impress new antisemitism ideologues who until 2016 denounced Brussel’s failure to confront Muslim Judeophobia and counteract the “caricature of the state of Israel” as Nazi regime. A “working definition” of antisemitism reflective of its new form, they complained, was thoroughly lacking. In 2005, the Vienna-based European Monitoring Centre for Racism and Xenophobia had endorsed a “working definition” in which “double standards” on Israel, and the comparison of the Jewish state with Nazism, were categorized as hate speech. Yet its successor agency shelved the document in 2013: proof for critics that in the European Union “the new antisemitism is often glimpsed but rarely grasped.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

In 2016, however, the International Holocaust Remembrance Agency adopted a “working definition” of antisemitism first endorsed by Britain. In March 2024, at least forty-three countries, including all European Union states except Malta and Ireland, had adopted the IHRA statement. In Europe and the United States, numerous universities, media organizations, or state agencies incorporated the document into their statutes. For its advocates, the IHRA definition only reflected the distinctiveness of antisemitism not sufficiently recognized in existing antiracist legislation. It simply clarified, “for the benefits of governments and administrators at all levels, what kind of activity can be considered as antisemitism and why.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ But the IHRA definition turned key tenets of new antisemitism ideology into definitional standards. To portray the state of Israel as “racist endeavor,” for instance, meant “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination,” not legitimate characterization of Israeli rule over Palestinians. The IHRA statement, to be sure, stipulated that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled to another country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” Objectors retorted that “there are no effective checks to prevent (…) its abusive application,” namely, the censoring of anti-Zionist speech. Authors of an alternative definition pointed out that seven out of eleven examples of antisemitism featured in the document “focus on the state of Israel.” Palestinian and Arab scholars, for their part, argued that to label antisemitic “anyone who call the existing state of Israel as racist (…) amounts to granting Israel absolute impunity.” A lead drafter of a “working definition” penned in the early 2000s and later reproduced in the IHRA statement, expressed regret. “None of us anticipated that it would be used as this blunt instrument to suppress pro-Palestinian speech,” avowed the former American Jewish Committee official Kenneth Stern.Footnote ¹¹⁹

For its challengers, the IHRA “holy writ” was merely “the Zionist definition of antisemitism.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Yet despite push-back, the statement imposed itself as standard policy framework in Europe (in addition to Commonwealth countries, North America, and parts of Latin America). The widespread endorsement of the IHRA definition was not merely the result of pro-Israel lobbying, or the weaponization of antisemitism by Israeli governments. The success of a “working definition” of antisemitism issued by an international Holocaust organization above all derived from the support it received from Europe’s political mainstream. Center-leftists and moderate conservatives alike recognized in it familiar features of post-1989 philosemitism: Holocaust remembrance, anti-antisemitism, and the defense of Zionism’s legitimacy. The European Commission, for its part, viewed the IHRA definition an “essential tool for (…) tackling antisemitism (…) in particular for education and training purposes.” Out of attention to the “victims’ perspectives,” the safeguard of Jews in Europe justified deference to the IHRA guidelines and special attention to critical anti-Israel speech.Footnote ¹²¹

The twenty-first-century European Union’s policy kit against antisemitism also included “monitoring and research,” “legal frameworks,” “policies and actions,” as well as Holocaust remembrance and education programs. By 2015, however, Brussels was also committed to “fostering Jewish life” in EU member states. Few citizens of the Union likely knew of this policy sphere, but the “promotion of the European Way of Life” entailed both the preservation and cultivation of “Jewish Life” under a coordinator appointed in December 2015. While unknown outside Eurocrat circles, this language testified of the Jews’ symbolic status as Europe’s archetypal friends, seventy years after the Holocaust. In 2015, to be sure, the Commission also appointed a “coordinator on combatting anti-Muslim hatred.” The separation of antisemitism and racism, often decried as betrayal of unitary antiracism, allowed here for a more targeted focus on Islamophobia. The fight against anti-Muslim bigotry, however, proceeded without pledges to “foster” Muslim life as part of the European Way of Life. What was distinctively “European” in the Commission’s anti-Islamophobia agenda was its commitment to social inclusion and antidiscrimination.Footnote ¹²² EU anti-antisemitism, by contrast, stressed the value of Jewish life and its unique precariousness. Deadly radical Islamist attacks on Jews in Toulouse (2012), Brussels (2014), Paris (2015), or Copenhagen (2015) had already reinforced this perception. “France, without Jews, will no longer be France,” declared the French socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls in the wake of the Hyper Casher attack of January 2015. David Cameron, for his part, avowed that he would be “heartbroken” should British Jews decide that the country is no longer safe for them. “We are glad and thankful that there is Jewish life again in Germany,” stated Angela Merkel in February 2015. Six months later, her notorious “We can manage” signaled readiness to accept 800,000 predominantly Muslim refugees in the country. Throughout their integration process, many will be instructed that the unflinching protection of Jewish life in Germany, but also Israel, was now a core tenet of German identity.

New antisemitism, then, produced in return a new philosemitism in which “Jewish life,” in the words of Angela Merkel, “is part of our identity and culture.” Thankfulness for Jewish presence after the Holocaust had long been part of German atoning pronouncements. But the valorization of Jewish life, and proclamations of its vital necessity for Europe, now transcended the realm of German philosemitism. “To achieve full recognition of Jewish life as part of Europe’s society,” stated the European Commission in 2021, “awareness and knowledge of Jewish history and culture need to be increased among the general public.” This statement may be dismissed as inconsequential Euro-talk, but such official longing for Jewishness in integrated Europe was a novelty of the post-1989 era. In Brussels or Strasbourg at least, Jewish life and European life achieved symbiosis during the first two decades of the twenty-first century.Footnote ¹²³

As philosemitism became acquis communautaire, however, left and postcolonial critics denounced the phenomenon as “philosemitic reaction,” “Euro-Zionism,” “state philosemitism,” or Holocaust “catechism.”Footnote ¹²⁴ To understand why philosemitism elicited a spate of “anti-philosemitic” writings in the twenty-first century requires paying attention to its reconfiguration. Already noticeable at the end of the 1990s, the hijacking of philosemitism by the populist, Islamophobic, and anti-immigrant far-right positioned a dubious “love for the Jews” on the side of illiberalism: The antisemites of yesterday converted then to a philosemitism more often than not synonymous with “pro-Israel antisemitism.”Footnote ¹²⁵ In Germany, Angela Merkel’s “hyper Zionism,” uncontested by her red–yellow–green successors, elicited a backlash against “philosemitic McCarthyism.” Remembrance culture, avowed a disappointed admirer of Germany’s historical reckoning, had gone “haywire.”Footnote ¹²⁶ The migration of pro-Jewish “friendship” to the populist far-right, along with its radicalization in twenty-first-century Germany, has exposed “the new European philosemitism” to systematic critique.Footnote ¹²⁷ Meanwhile, the normative liberal pillars of philosemitism in the New Europe – the memory of the unique Holocaust, the war on antisemitism, and acceptance of Zionism’s legitimacy – also came under scrutiny.