“Do not flaunt your rights; that would be going too far (…) Act so that the good French people of France who hoped to never see you again forget that you exist.” In his recommendations to a fictitious young Jewish friend published as a short book in February 1945, the French-Jewish lawyer André Weil-Curiel used irony to describe an inhospitable climate. Your first duty as a Jew, the disillusioned jurist advised his imaginary interlocutor, “was to not draw attention to yourself.” French society, he explained, expected discretion from Jewish survivors. Invisibility was the price to pay to “once again live without hurdles in the land of your forefathers”: The main obstacle to reintegration was not discrimination but indifference to the fate of the Jews during the German occupation.Footnote ¹

Like Weil-Curiel, the French-Jewish novelist Albert Cohen spent the war in London before returning to Paris after the Liberation. His thoughts on the afterlife of antisemitism after Nazism, however, were more somber. “I know that the old wish for ‘death to the Jews’,” Cohen observed in September 1945, “still awaits me on the walls of all capitals.” The future best-selling author of Belle du Seigneur [Her Lover, 1968] and recipient of the French Academy Prize did not view the defeat of the Third Reich as a Zero Hour of Judeophilia. “Death to the Jews” painted on walls, or graffiti in the Parisian subway mocking the return of Holocaust survivors as “Hitler’s revenge,” revealed inveterate hatred. Cohen wrote these lines in an essay dedicated to his first encounter with antisemitism during his youth in Marseille, where at the age of ten he endured the mockery of a Jew-baiting peddler and a surrounding crowd. His boyhood dream, he explained, was to one day be able to recount this traumatic experience in writing. The aspiring young novelist imagined a cathartic scenario: His tale of shame would elicit remorse in his former tormenters and forgiveness in the adult writer. Both would then reconcile, “forever kind to each other.” The fifty-year-old man of letters fulfilled his childhood wish in September 1945 in the pages of Esprit. Yet by then he had abandoned hope for common ground. “I know that these men and women,” he wrote, “will not cry after reading me and will not like me more than in the past.” Despite the return of democracy, Cohen believed, prejudice was here to stay.Footnote ²

Jewish-American observers of liberated Europe shared a similar sentiment. “The world-wide dissemination of the poisonous virus of antisemitism,” predicted the historian Koppel Pinson in April 1945, “will remain to plague the victorious United Nations for many years to come.”Footnote ³ Three years later, however, the European correspondents of the American Jewish Year Book (AJYB) offered encouraging insights. Published under the auspices of the American Jewish Committee, the AJYB monitored the rebuilding of Jewish life after the Holocaust. This yearly report relied on a network of French, British, German, Austrian, Italian, Dutch, and Belgian contributors spread across European capitals. In 1948, they found Jewish communities in formerly German-occupied countries in Western Europe “relatively stabilized. The pre-war political status of the Jews was re-established. Jewish civic rights were restored, and individual and institutional life returned to normal to a considerable extent.” The AJYB also praised the economic recovery of Jews, which exceeded “the pace towards readjustment of general populations.” The observers of Jewish reconstruction recognized that “anti-Jewish sentiment […] persisted in all areas and strata of society.” Yet three years after the Holocaust, “hardly any overt or organized anti-Semitism has taken root in Western Europe.”Footnote ⁴ This assessment did not include Allied-occupied Germany and Austria where public opinion polls revealed high levels of hostility. The AJYB likewise addressed antisemitic tumult in Britain in a separate section. But since 1945 its correspondents described a consistent trend. In Western European countries freed from German occupation, as in victorious Britain, antisemitism lost its public respectability. The French Catholic writer Georges Bernanos acknowledged in his own way this new code of conduct. Himself not immune from anti-Jewish feelings before the war, Bernanos blamed Nazism for giving mild despisal of Jews a bad name. Hitler, he wrote in May 1944, had forever “dishonored” antisemitism. In June 1945, the British diplomat and man of letters Harold Nicolson expressed a similar sentiment. While he still disliked Jews, he now also “loathed” antisemitism. In Vienna, “The Nazis have ruined everything – including antisemitism” was another iteration of this view. The defeat of the Third Reich, as Albert Cohen noted, was not the defeat of Judeophobia. At a minimum, however, Hitler’s fall deprived “moderate” antisemites from the free rein they enjoyed prior to 1945.Footnote ⁵

Other monitors of Jewish life were justifiably more preoccupied with the situation of Holocaust survivors in East-Central Europe. In Soviet-controlled areas, wrote the Swiss francophone philosopher Denis de Rougemont in September 1946, the “hellish fire” of antisemitism continued to burn “even in provinces unaware of a Jewish problem since the Middle Age.”Footnote ⁶ Freshly returned from six years of exile in the United States, the proponent of European federalism was reacting to the recent Kielce pogrom of July 4, 1946, the most publicized outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in Poland since the end of the war. Until the summer of 1946, criminal acts against Jews in the Western Soviet Union, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia had passed unnoticed outside the region. In Poland during the same period, homicides occurred in Białystok, Krakow, Lublin, Łódź, and Rzeszów.Footnote ⁷ But the shocking murder in Kielce of forty-two Holocaust survivors accused of blood libel made international headlines. It also awakened De Rougemont, the author of Love in the Western World (1939) and a dreamer of European unity, to the “rage of antisemitism” across the Iron Curtain. The atrocities perpetrated in Kielce, similarly wrote in July 1946 the French Catholic thinker and ambassador to the Vatican Jacques Maritain, unleashed an “unprecedented fury of humiliation and cruelty.”Footnote ⁸ From 1945 to 1953, and from destalinization to the end of the Cold War, the level of both official and grassroot antisemitism in Soviet satellite countries – a topic beyond the purview of this chapter – varied according to national cases. But the steady emigration of many remaining East-Central European Jews turned discrimination or scapegoating across the Iron Curtain into a distinctive “antisemitism without Jews.”Footnote ⁹ Anti-Jewish hostility in the Communist bloc until 1989, and as discussed in the last part of this book, heritage philosemitism in East-Central Europe after 1989, shared a common feature: Both took place in the background of Jewish absence.

“Antisemitism without Jews,” however, also applied to occupied Germany and Austria where the near entirety of the prewar Jewish population was driven out or murdered during the Third Reich era. The meager trickle of Jewish “remigrants” in both countries during the first postwar years never reestablished sizeable Jewish communities. Approximately 282,000 Jews had emigrated from Nazi Germany by September 1939 and 117,000 from annexed Austria. Only a few thousand returned to their native countries. Allied-occupied Germany, however, hosted close to a quarter million Jewish displaced persons between 1945 and 1948, a number superior to the approximately 100,000 Jewish survivors who transited through Austria at the same time. In both countries, the unexpected presence of Yiddish-speaking survivors encouraged the portrayal of Holocaust refugees as “black-marketeering,” “parasitic,” or “criminal”: In Jewish-populated American occupation zones, antisemitism did not operate “without Jews.”

The number of Holocaust survivors in West Germany, of course, dwindled to approximately 30,000 after the departure of most displaced persons (DPs) to Israel and North America by 1950. Yet “secondary antisemitism,” the mechanism of guilt repression and self-victimization identified in the early 1950s by the Frankfurt School critical theorists, remained predicated on the fantasy of Jewish omnipresence. The haunting image of the surviving Jew, a group experiment conducted in 1950 and 1951 revealed, impeded the repression of the Nazi past by reminding Germans of their crimes. Through psychological inversion, observed Theodor Adorno, Germans turned the victims of the Holocaust into persecutors of an innocent nation. “It was not the SS people who were brutal, who tortured the Jews,” Adorno remarked, “but the Jews who supposedly forced the Germans to acknowledge the crimes of the SS.” Despite the murder or emigration of most German Jews, subliminal anger directed at “Jewish power” turned Jewish absence into a tormenting presence.Footnote ¹⁰ “Can something be perceived to be present if it is no longer there?,” wondered the German Jewish philosopher Ernst Bloch in 1963. “Doubtless,” he answered, “the Jews are perceived in this way, even though the country has been nearly emptied of them.”Footnote ¹¹ Similar guilt-defensiveness was apparent in antagonistic comments about Jewish returnees in Austria: opportunists who abandoned their country after 1938 and lived in luxury abroad while the nation suffered.Footnote ¹²

“Antisemitism without Jews” in East-Central Europe and “secondary antisemitism” in West Germany or Austria, however, were not the only mutated forms of Judeophobia after 1945. In the Western half of the continent, “antisemitism without antisemites” best describes the transformation of anti-Jewish animus in the wake of the Holocaust.Footnote ¹³ Awareness of Nazi atrocities against the Jews, as André Weil-Curiel and Albert Cohen noticed in liberated France, did not eliminate resentment. But after the figure of the Jewish enemy took center stage in Nazi-ruled Europe, the revival of democracy on the Western part of the continent was premised on the prohibition of fascist or Nazi ideology. In what became Marshall Plan Europe, a moratorium on public expressions of antisemitism demarcated the old from the new: For the first time in European history, overt animus against Jews became off-limits in public discourse. Antisemitism, in the words of the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot, became then “bereft of antisemitism”: a sentiment no longer identifiable in political programs and ideologies but private, latent, or unconscious.Footnote ¹⁴ The following overview of “antisemitism without antisemites” in Western Europe from 1945 to 1960 reveals the simultaneous return of prejudice and the delegitimation of antisemitism in politics and culture. Loss of public respectability, however, forced the redirection of negative perceptions of Jews toward positive representations: For non-Jews with a lingering Jewish problem, philosemitism now offered an alternative channel of expression.

Resurgence and Disrepute: Antisemitism in Republican France

“I do not stand with those who deny the existence of antisemitism in France,” the Catholic novelist and essayist François Mauriac wrote in October 1945. “The mail I receive at Le Figaro,” he added, “is a daily proof of its vigor.”Footnote ¹⁵ Omnipresent in collaborationist newspapers under the Vichy regime, antisemitic propaganda finally ceased at the Liberation.Footnote ¹⁶ Yet Mauriac still saw around him large pockets of hostility. French Jews persecuted under Vichy, however, swiftly recovered their status of citizen. The road to civic reintegration began in colonial Algeria. On October 20, 1943, the French National Liberation Committee based in Algiers reinstated the Crémieux Decree abrogated in October 1940. Although long in the making, this decision allowed 140,000 native Algerian Jews to recuperate French citizenship. In metropolitan France, the Ordinance of August 9, 1944 reestablished the civil rights of 225,000 Jews who survived the occupation in hiding or returned eight months later from death camps (only 3 percent of the 76,000 French and foreign Jews deported from March 1942 to August 1944 came back). The program of national reconstruction drafted by the leaders of the resistance in March 1944 had promised “absolute equality of all citizens before the law.” Like other blueprints for the restoration of the republic, it did not single out Jews from other victims. The August 9 Ordinance was a noticeable exception. All acts “that establish or apply any discrimination whatsoever founded on the quality of being Jewish” were abolished even before the full liberation of the French territory.Footnote ¹⁷ The restoration of Republican legality also entailed affirmative measures to protect Jews against defamation. Reinstated on August 9, 1944, the Marchandeau Law issued in April 1939 but repealed by the Vichy regime prohibited “insult against a group of persons belonging by their origin to a particular race or religion.” Jews were not explicitly named, but the law’s original purpose was to defend them against antisemitic libel. After the German occupation, public offenders of Jews could still take cover behind the 1881 law on the freedom of the press. The reinstatement of the Marchandeau Law nonetheless signaled that the age of permissive antisemitic incitement had come to a close.Footnote ¹⁸

Despite the legal safeguards enacted after the Liberation, however, anti-Jewish agitation flared up among inhabitants of Jewish-owned apartments confiscated during the war. In Paris alone, 25,000 Jewish families (approximately 100,000 people) had been evicted from their places of residence. The Ordinance of November 14, 1944, opened a legal avenue for the restitution of Jewish flats or businesses placed under the trusteeship of non-Jewish administrators. But until a more favorable law was passed on April 21, 1945, Jewish claimants were not entitled to recover apartments occupied by war widows and in certain cases had to repay the full amount of the purchase price to the new possessors. They were also met with the resistance of new tenants and owners, among them war-displaced French refugees accommodated in empty Jewish apartments. It took for instance a year and a half of legal wrangling for the family of the future lawyer and Holocaust historian Serge Klarsfeld to recover its apartment on the western outskirts of Paris. “Our predecessors,” recalled Klarsfeld, “had dirtied the walls and teared the wallpaper to make sure that we would not benefit from their investment.”Footnote ¹⁹

Organized in a dozen of associations, defenders of “property rights” couched their grievances in a language unadulterated by the demise of the Vichy regime. “What an injustice to expel a Frenchman in favor of a foreign Jew who wants to reclaim his pre-war lodging,” exclaimed one of them.Footnote ²⁰ Returning Jews, wrote the Jewish writer of Russian origin Nina Gourfinkel, reclaimed “their homes, their stores, and even, what impudence, their accounts. Then the provisional owners felt a bitter regret: ‘Why didn’t they all perish in the ovens!’”Footnote ²¹ Gourfinkel failed to add that in virtually all cases, tribunals vindicated Jewish claimants. But the short-lived anti-restitution movement exemplified the persistence of prejudice within parts of the French population. A survey conducted in 1946 showed that for 37 percent of respondents, Jews could not be considered “Frenchmen like all others.”Footnote ²²

In 1946, the AJYB correspondent in Paris nonetheless commended France for “the absence of antisemitism as a political force.”Footnote ²³ Far-right ideology, however, slowly reemerged on the margins of mainstream politics. Although temporarily blacklisted or imprisoned, veterans of the wartime “antisemitism of the pen” all resumed literary or journalistic activities in the early 1950s.Footnote ²⁴ Other fascist sympathizers during the war, such as the literary critique Maurice Bardèche, mutated into Holocaust deniers. “We have all become Jews,” lamented Brasillach’s brother-in-law in his pamphlet Nuremberg ou la terre promise [Nuremberg or the Promised Land] published in 1948. Foreboding a theme dear to future Holocaust revisionists, Bardèche denounced a Jewish monopoly on the memory of World War II.Footnote ²⁵ The former pro-German collaborationist was condemned in March 1952 to a year of incarceration for “apology of war crimes” but only spent two weeks in prison. Wartime enforcers of antisemitic policies, from higher echelon officials to police officers, were more forcefully prosecuted. Although low-level bureaucrats of the Commissariat-General on Jewish Affairs generally escaped justice, the purge of collaborators in France did not bypass the persecutors of Jews. Yet leniency rapidly mitigated retribution. Xavier Vallat, the head of the Commissariat from March 1941 to May 1942, was condemned to ten years in prison in 1947, released in 1949, authorized to sign books for his supporters in 1953, and amnestied in 1954.Footnote ²⁶ French Jews, from then on, had to live in a society in which one of the key enablers of the Final Solution in the country roamed free.

The reappearance of Vichy-era antisemites did not however impede the rebuilding of the French-Jewish community. Approximately 300,000 Jews, 60 percent of them still of Eastern European origin, securely lived in France at the start of the 1950s. The revival and development of cultural and religious institutions progressed apace.Footnote ²⁷ For the intellectual review Esprit, the time had arrived to declare antisemitism a foreign phenomenon. The essayist Jean-Marie Domenach saw Jew-hatred in full display in New York during the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in March 1951, a cause célèbre equated in France to the Dreyfus Affair. While in the United States cautious Jewish-American leaders refused to “inject the false issue of antisemitism” in public discussions of the Rosenberg trial, the couple executed in 1953 was portrayed by its French defenders as “scapegoats for American antisemitism.”Footnote ²⁸ Hate of Jews, added Domenach, simultaneously flared in Prague with the show trial in November 1952 of the Jewish-born Rudolf Slánský and thirteen other defendants (ten of them also Jewish) accused of conspiracy against the state. Obscenities still appeared in the far-right press, but the fertile ground of antisemitism was now McCarthyite America and Stalinist Eastern Europe, “where Jews are simultaneously accused of the same crime.”Footnote ²⁹ Searching for a “third way” between Atlanticism and Communism, Cold War intellectuals such as Domenach viewed the two superpowers as equal persecutors of Jewish citizens. Paling in comparison, French antisemitism only amounted to a shameful but largely contained illness.

The rabbi and archivist Isaac Schneerson, founder in 1943 of the clandestine Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, did not share this optimism. In 1947, Schneerson coordinated in Paris the first meeting of Jewish historical commissions from eleven different European countries. Like his colleagues at the time, Schneerson was confident that antisemitism would no longer affect Jewish life in Western Europe. The pioneering chronicler of the Final Solution changed his mind in 1955. “Ten years after the splendid victory,” he observed, “antisemitism, under its neo-Nazi guise or otherwise, has reappeared in public life.”Footnote ³⁰ The Institute of Jewish Affairs of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) concurred. “The period of relative fear, when the anti-Semites did not dare to profess themselves such, is now over and wide liberty prevails in this respect,” reported its Parisian representative in 1956.”Footnote ³¹ Pierre Poujade, the leader of a shopkeeper, artisan, and lower-middle class protest movement, was in the mid 1950s the most vocal transgressor of the antisemitic taboo in France. Ten years on from the Vichy regime, the populist demagogue publicly challenged Pierre Mendès-France’s right to lead the French nation because of his Jewish origins. Predicated on anti-taxation, anti-urbanization, and antimodernization, Poujadism was unevenly contaminated by antisemitism. This ephemeral electoral rebellion nonetheless revealed how Judeophobic rhetoric easily crept into the politics of resentment. Public expressions of antisemitism, however, remained both rare and off-limit. For the Jewish intellectual Wladimir Rabi, author in 1962 of the first comprehensive study of the postwar Jewish community, the problem of antisemitism in France was not its “sporadic manifestations” but its dormant “virtualities.”Footnote ³²

“Jew-Consciousness”: Belgium

In Belgium, where half of the 65,000 Jews who resided in the country in 1940 perished in Auschwitz and other camps, all the anti-Jewish measures in force during the occupation were abrogated after Allied troops liberated Brussels on September 4, 1944. The AJYB praised Belgian authorities for their efforts to “abolish antisemitism from the country” but added a note of caution: “The general population in Belgium, as in all other countries of Nazi occupation, has not been immune from infection with the anti-Semitic virus, which is now showing its effect even after liberation.”Footnote ³³ Progress was nonetheless noticed. Antisemitism, reported the AJYB in 1947, was “despised by the population at large.” Yet anti-Jewish statements remained traceable in the press “under the cover of xenophobia (…) and the “situation has not progressed favorably during the past year.” Régine Orfinger-Karlin, the AJYB correspondent in Brussels, warned that “Jew-consciousness, practically unknown before the war, now exists.”Footnote ³⁴ Of particular concern was “xenophobia (…) heightened by the influx of foreign Jews on Belgian soil, since the recent immigrants had to compete with returning Belgian war veterans for jobs and business opportunities.”Footnote ³⁵

Antisemitism in Belgium intersected with the “alien problem” revived after the war with the influx of Eastern European refugees and displaced persons from Germany. Like the vast majority of the approximately 25,000 Jews deported from Belgium, most of the 30,000 Jewish survivors who came out of hiding as well as the approximately 1,300 returnees from extermination camps were foreign nationals of predominantly Polish and German origin: Less than 5 percent of the Jews present in Belgium at the end of the war were citizens of the country. Jewish refugees trickling in from Germany added to this tally. In 1947, government figures placed at 4,500 the number of such “transients.” As in the 1930s, “aliens” and “Jews” remained interchangeable in anti-foreigner rhetoric. On April 30, 1946, the Flemish social Christian newspaper Het Volk hoped that “one can go through with a wide broom” to rid Belgium of black-marketeering “aliens,” a euphemism for Jews. Others blamed “aliens, especially the Jews” for their “brutal” capitalist exploitation of the Belgian middle class.Footnote ³⁶

Prejudice also played a part in the exclusion of Holocaust survivors from the categories of war victims entitled to official status and material compensation. The majority of surviving Jews in Belgium (or their spouses or children if deceased) did not receive the status of “political prisoners” defined, in a law enacted in March 1947, as persons arrested for acts or resistance. Jewish survivors unable to show proof of anti-German activities prior to their deportation were consequently denied pensions. The inferior position of Jews in the hierarchy of patriotic martyrs was already evident in the debates preceding the passing of the law. Arrested during the war by the Gestapo and imprisoned for three years, the Resistance leader Camille Joset balked at comparison between underground fighters and Jewish victims of Nazism. “You don’t have to be anti-semitic to be troubled if someone wrongly suspects you of having been arrested as a Jew,” Joset declared in April 1946. Members of the powerful Christian Social Party likewise belittled the suffering of “racial deportees” not involved in “patriotic activities.” As one of them contended, Jews only arrested for “racial motives and others interned for different reasons, such as sellers on the black market” were not equals to heroic “political prisoners.”Footnote ³⁷

In France, a law passed on August 6, 1948 separated the déportés résistants – active resistance fighters sent to concentration camps – from “political deportees and internees,” a category including the victims of the Final Solution. Until 1970, French resisters deported to Buchenwald, Dachau or Ravensbrück received higher pensions than the rare Jews who came back from Auschwitz. But in the French Republic, Jewish survivors were nonetheless incorporated into the highly symbolic community of déportés. In Belgium, Holocaust victims unable to secure the status of “political prisoner” after the war only obtained official recognition, if still alive, at the start of the twenty-first century.Footnote ³⁸

Discrimination in compensation was not, however, indicative of pervasive antisemitism. At the start of the 1950s, the approximately 40,000 Jews residing in Belgium and divided between Brussels and Antwerp experienced difficulties in acquiring citizenship. Yet according to the AJYB, “there was scarcely any manifestation of anti-Semitism” in the country. Derogatory cartoons occasionally appeared in Flemish periodicals but the Orthodox community of Antwerp resumed its activities in the diamond trade without hostility. “In the main,” reported Régine Orfinger-Karlin in 1952, “the Jewish community lives as a well-respected neighbor of the very large Catholic community.”Footnote ³⁹ The WJC reached a similar conclusion. “Antisemitism in Belgium,” confirmed the New York–based organization in 1955, “manifests itself sporadically and in mild forms.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The position of the Jewish population in Belgium, estimated at about 40,000, was “good and improving,” noted the AJYB in 1957.

Exiled from Vienna to Brussels, the Auschwitz survivor Jean Améry was not troubled by antisemitism in his host country when after twenty years of silence he reflected on his wartime ordeal. “My neighbor greets me in a friendly fashion, Bonjour Monsieur; I doff my hat, Bonjour Madame,” Améry wrote in At the Mind’s Limit, published in 1964. “But Madame and Monsieur,” he added, “are separated by interstellar distances.” The problem of the “Catastrophe Jew,” as Améry defined himself, was not hostility from non-Jews but an unbridgeable gap between him and the surrounding society. A Jew without “positive determinants,” Améry resolved himself to “get along without trust in the world.”Footnote ⁴¹ The marginalization of antisemitism in postwar democracy, he intimated, offered meager alleviation of trauma.

The Dutch Paradox

In the liberated Netherlands, the number of Jews declined from 140,000 on the eve of the war to approximately 30,000 in 1945. Out of the 104,000 Jewish deportees to Auschwitz, Sobibor, and Bergen Belsen, only 5,200 survived.Footnote ⁴² The tragedy of Dutch Jews did not however elicit visible empathy in the months following the liberation. In May 1945, returning Holocaust survivors received a colder reception than forced laborers liberated earlier from Germany. Suspicious Dutch citizens alleged that Jews had fled the country to spend the war in safety. Others claimed that stashes of hidden bank notes awaited them upon their return. In tramways or shops, Jews were occasionally told that “they have forgotten to gas you.” In Amsterdam, some survivors found their homes looted or boarded up and forced to spend months in rudimentary centers.Footnote ⁴³ All anti-Jewish measures were annulled in September 1944, and in May 1945 the first synagogue service held in Amsterdam attracted many non-Jews who came to sympathize with the aggrieved Jewish community. Yet in the summer of 1945, the situation was worrying enough to warrant the creation of a study group, composed of intellectuals from Amsterdam, on “antisemitic attitudes in the Netherlands.” The AJYB reported unprecedented animosity in the wake of the German surrender: “For the first time in the history of the Netherlands, open attacks against Jews appeared in the press, indicating that anti-Semitism has become prevalent among some sections of the population.”Footnote ⁴⁴

These hostile attitudes did not however translate into political agitation. There was “nothing in the way of organized antisemitism and no trace of antisemitism in government policy” in a country traditionally tolerant toward its Jewish population.Footnote ⁴⁵ Abel Hertzberg, a Jewish lawyer and survivor of Bergen Belsen, found antisemitism “very widespread” in 1945 but took comfort in the rise of “very strong countercurrents.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Nonetheless, the popularity of stereotypes such as Jewish “ungratefulness” revealed the fragile position of Jews in Dutch society. In July 1945, the resistance newspaper De Patriot enjoined Jews to “refrain from excessive behavior” and “think constantly how grateful they ought to be.” They had indeed the “noble, principled and consistently Christian feeling of the Dutch population to thank for.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Many Dutch citizens helped 28, 000 hunted Jews find places of hiding and others looked after their possessions. But approximately 8,000 Jews were victims of denunciations and passive forms of antisemitism hindered greater rescue. Few in the Netherlands questioned the myth of a Dutch nation united against German anti-Jewish operations. In 1945, the social-democrat Hilda Verwey-Jonker was a rare politician claiming that the population behaved “utterly miserably” toward their persecuted countrymen.Footnote ⁴⁸ The AJYB, for its part, relativized the extent of Dutch rescue efforts. “While many Netherlands citizens of other faiths showed great solidarity with their Jewish compatriots,” reported the American publication in 1946, “this did not occur on as large a scale as in France and Belgium.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Amsterdam Jews, however, dutifully met the challenge of “gratefulness.” Despite financial hardships, the Jewish community raised funds for a Monument of Jewish Gratitude inaugurated in 1950. The memorial paid tribute to Dutch “love,” “protection,” and “resistance” during the Holocaust. This polite manifestation of Jewish solidarity with Dutch suffering (“Mourning with You” is one of the monument’s inscriptions) did not signify harmonious reintegration: Sharpened by the war, a chasm separated the small Jewish community from the rest of society. Between 1945 and 1953, approximately 5,000 Dutch Jews emigrated to Western countries or Israel. The “Dutch paradox,” a phrase coined at the start of the 1950s, connoted the inability of a resurgent Jewish community to envision a future in the Netherlands.Footnote ⁵⁰ Unequal in their quest for restitution and official recognition, Jews experienced isolation at a time of greater national unity. The weakening “pillarization” of Dutch society, which until the war divided Catholic, Protestant, and working-class socialist constituencies, allowed for greater national homogeneity: The “spirit of resistance” now captured the essence of the Dutch nation. Unification under the banner of anti-German heroism, however, ostracized “passive” Holocaust victims from national remembrance until the beginning of the 1960s.Footnote ⁵¹

In 1947, the publication of Anne Frank’s diary passed relatively unnoticed until its international success propagated the image of Dutch neighborly help during the Holocaust. The young girl’s journal, perceived by its first readers as a shocking violation of childhood innocence, did not however promote interest in the situation of Holocaust survivors in the Netherlands. But its growing popularity coincided with a steady decline of antisemitism in the Netherlands. From 1950 to 1955, the AJYB correspondent in Amsterdam struggled to find “anything that could be described as outright discrimination or anti-Semitism.” In 1955, the WJC offered a more balanced assessment: “The Dutch people now became Jew-conscious. Though unable to speak of concrete antisemitism, one can say that the Jew as such is more conspicuous than in the past.”Footnote ⁵² Awareness of Jewish difference, however, also paved the way for new attitudes at the start of the 1960s. As Dutch society embraced cultural progressivism, attention to psychic trauma consecrated Jewish victimhood as a yardstick for human suffering and injustice.Footnote ⁵³ This outcome, foreboding greater sympathy for Jews and the state of Israel in the 1960s and 1970s, was not easily predictable during the first postwar decade, when the wedge drawn between Jews and Dutch society during the German occupation still separated both sides.

Italy: “Persecution of Love”?

Approximately 47,000 Jews lived in Italy before Mussolini’s regime enacted its first racial law on November 17, 1938. An estimated 30,000 Jews were still in the country after its complete liberation from German occupation in April 1945; around 8,000 Jews perished in Auschwitz and other camps after the German invaders began deportations in the fall of 1943. Less than 1,000 Jewish survivors returned home. Only completed in 1947, the annulment process of the 1938 racial laws was frustratingly long. But at the Liberation, hostile acts against Jews were exceptionally rare.Footnote ⁵⁴ “Anti-Semitism has not taken root among the Italian people,” reported the AJYB in 1945.Footnote ⁵⁵ The approximately 50,000 Jewish displaced persons who entered Italy on their way to Palestine between 1945 and 1948 were generally met with sympathy, even if impoverished Sicilians envied “the abundance of luxury goods like American cigarettes and chocolate” availed to Jewish refugees.Footnote ⁵⁶ Antisemitism, however, did not entirely fade from view. German-language newspapers in the Alto Adige, formerly South Tyrol, indulged in anti-Jewish attacks. In Rome, a neofascist mob rioted in the Jewish quarter on April 16, 1948.Footnote ⁵⁷ But antagonism toward Jews also expressed itself in milder forms. The experiences of Jewish university professors banned in 1938 and reemployed after the war is a case in point. Some resentful academics, miraculously redeemed from prior allegiance to Fascism, attached the stigma of “usurpers” to reappointed Jewish scholars.Footnote ⁵⁸

For the Jewish litterateur Giacomo Denebedetti, however, the most worrying issue at the time of liberation was not antisemitism but a counterintuitive “persecution of love.” While he lauded the sympathy shown to surviving Jews in the territories freed of German occupation, Debenedetti feared that these “generous attempts to recompense Jews” for their suffering might once again serve to distinguish “the Jewish race from the human race.” It would be better, he added, if sympathy was “diluted into an enduring, continuous solidarity, capable of steadily averting evil.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Debenedetti’s contempt for this “surplus of love” epitomized the embrace of the resistance ethos among postwar Jewish elites. The participation of many Italian Jews in the anti-German struggle facilitated the absorption of the Jewish experience within the national antifascist struggle. For Jews especially, the Resistanza carried a promise of democratic and social renewal after seven years of exclusion and persecution. Even Jewish intellectuals who did not take part in armed resistance, such as the rabbi and journalist Dante Lattes, dutifully integrated the Holocaust into an acceptable antifascist narrative. “Six million dead,” claimed Lattes, were the Jewish “contribution to the struggle against fascism.”Footnote ⁶⁰

For the Italian Communist Party and the Christian Democracy, however, the Resistance had more instrumental purposes. Like in France, Communists claimed ownership of the anti-German armed struggle to mobilize a wide working-class electorate. Christian Democrats, for their part, turned the legacy of the Resistance into a symbol of postwar Italian unity. Neither party was interested in confronting the deep impregnation of Italian society with fascism. The refusal of Italian political elites to confront the country’s recent past was made evident on June 22, 1946, with the passing of an amnesty law covering most fascist crimes. The “second risorgimento” hoped for by Italian Jews dissolved into a “good Italian” myth according to which the nation resisted fascism in spirit if not in deeds, despite more than two decades of mass support for Mussolini.Footnote ⁶¹ The Liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce had already set the tone in October 1944: Fascism was a “moral and intellectual illness” yet a parenthesis in the healthy course of Italian history. Although tens of thousands of Italians assisted the German occupation apparatus in roundups and expropriation, the murder of approximately 8,000 Italian Jews could safely be blamed on German actions.Footnote ⁶² Italian Jews supported this interpretation. In 1946, the Jewish journalist and lawyer Eucardio Momigliano called the Fascist regime “tragic and grotesque” but lauded the Italian character allegedly impervious to Jew-hatred.Footnote ⁶³

The eagerness of the Italian Jewish community to find its place in the self-proclaimed antifascist nation did not prevent the occasional airing of derogatory views on Holocaust survivors. A former partisan and future president of the Italian senate, the Liberal party member Cesare Merzagora, drew in December 1945 and January 1946 a long list of warnings to Jewish survivors repatriated from German extermination camps. “Jews who return should control themselves. Italy has changed in many ways,” urged Merzagora. The inhumane treatment inflicted to Jews provoked “a general sense of solidarity with the persecuted, but it did not eliminate all the questions concerning the Jews themselves.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Benedetto Croce encouraged Jews to refuse particular “preferences and privileges.” The Neapolitan thinker, who in 1938 refused to sign fascist forms attesting to his non-Jewish ancestry, recalled “shivering with horror” while Jews in Italy were persecuted. But it was now time for them to abandon the “surviving traits of a barbaric and primitive religiosity.” Hitler, by “making his own” the Jewish idea of the chosen people, had fully demonstrated its dangerous potential.Footnote ⁶⁵

Catholic publications, for their part, did not enforce a strict moratorium on anti-Judaism. The influential Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica reined in overt attacks on Jews after 1945 but justified some of the measures taken “in defense of Christian society” during the Mussolini era. The Enciclopedia Cattolica published between 1948 and 1954 declared “racism and antisemitism” contrary to the “dictates of catholic morality.” Yet while it urged Catholics to embrace converted Jews and show “love” to those still unbaptized, Jesuit writers still considered “antisemitism legitimate in the field of ideas” to protect “the religious-moral and social heritage of Christianity.” By “antisemitism,” the Enciclopedia meant theological opposition to Judaism, not racist discrimination.Footnote ⁶⁶ But even if the election of Angelo Roncalli (John XXIII) to the papacy in 1958 marked a turning point in Jewish–Christian relations, the revision of the Church’s anti-Judaic teachings, soon carried out during the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), did not elicit ecclesiastical enthusiasm.Footnote ⁶⁷ The Catholic hierarchy’s resistance to reform, however, did not affect the lives of the approximately 33,000 Jews who lived in Italy in the mid-to-late 1950s. A joke on Jewish love for money heard in a radio broadcast or caricatures of orthodox Jews with protruded noses in a comic book signaled, to be sure, the persistence of stereotyping. But the Italian Jewish community, reported the AJYB in 1956, had “happily relatively little to do” regarding the protection of its members from antisemitism. Neofascist antisemitic agitation occurred in Rome in May 1958 and will again flare-up in 1960, yet “anti-Semitism in Italy did not exist on any significant scale.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Britain: Riots and Snobbery

Divided between an old-established elite, East-European immigrants, and recent refugees from Nazism, approximately 450,000 Jews lived in Britain at the start of the 1950s.Footnote ⁶⁹ Between 1940 and 1945, the struggle against Nazi Germany generated both pro-Jewish sentiment and Judeophobia on the home front. On December 17, 1942, the members of the House of Commons solemnly rose “in sympathy with the Jewish people and in protest against Nazi infamy.”Footnote ⁷⁰ But although Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was proscribed in 1940, anti-Jewish stereotypes such as “refuspies,” black-marketers, profiteers, or draft-dodgers circulated during the war. Writing in 1942, George Orwell gave a measure of this phenomenon: “One is constantly coming on pockets of it, non-violent, but pronounced enough to be disquieting.”Footnote ⁷¹ Dislike of excessive Jewish visibility survived the war. In 1945, the publisher and writer Eduard Hulton, whose magazine Picture Post denounced Nazi persecutions in the 1930s, urged Jews to “self-discipline” so as not to provoke further antagonism. Anti-Jewish attitudes recorded by the Mass Observation social research project between 1945 and 1947 confirmed the popularity of such stereotypes.Footnote ⁷²

For the Jewish Central Information Office, established in 1934 by the German-Jewish refugee Alfred Wiener, a more pressing issue was the “anti-Jewish campaign for the revival of fascism.”Footnote ⁷³ The release from prison of dozens of Mosley’s henchmen at the end of the war encouraged antisemitic agitation. No longer “kept down by a truly Christian culture,” lamented the Jewish historian Lewis Namier in 1946, British antisemitism was on the rise.Footnote ⁷⁴ Mosley himself started a new political party, the Union Movement, in 1947. But not all Jewish observers believed that the reemergence of British fascism constituted a serious threat. “Not in a few Jew-baiter associations,” argued the German-Jewish exile Herbert Friedenthal, “lies the danger of antisemitism in Britain but in that unmistakable differentiation between Jewish citizens and British citizens.” The main form of anti-Jewish prejudice in England, he wrote in May 1947, was the “subtle distinction between Jews and Gentiles”: The minor antisemitism still ingrained in British society.Footnote ⁷⁵

In the first days of August 1947, however, growing tensions in Mandate Palestine led to physical violence against Jews. After the hanging of two British sergeants by the Irgun in retaliation for the execution of three of its fighters, angry crowds in economically depressed Liverpool, Manchester, and Glasgow beat up Jews, damaged synagogues and torn down shops. Other attacks occurred in London, Bristol, and Hull. These events, reported the AJC correspondent in London, “shook the assurance of many who had been confident that overt manifestations of anti-Semitism were alien to England.”Footnote ⁷⁶ A month after the riots, however, Mass Observation found that the disturbances did not have any “pronounced lasting effect” on public opinion. The research conducted by the sociologist James H. Robb in Bethnal Green between 1947 and 1949 yielded more ambivalent results. In this working-class London borough, “only one inhabitant […] in eight is completely tolerant, but more than half of the remainder have to be openly invited to express their anti-Semitism before they will do it.” In 1949, fifty-five assaults against Jews were registered in metropolitan London.Footnote ⁷⁷

Antisemitic snobbery among British educated elites was more polite. In 1945, Eton College discretely curtailed the admission of “too many boys who, though themselves British subjects, were alien in outlook and difficult to assimilate into the intimate life of college.” In 1952, the conservative writer Evelyn Waugh’s candid remark epitomized this “mild” form of enduring prejudice: “I am afraid I must admit to a shade of anti-Jew feeling. Not anti-Semite.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Replete with unpleasant portrayals of Jews, the era of Chesterbelloc literature (1900–36) had drawn to a close. Yet negative connotations of Jews resurfaced in a few early postwar literary works.Footnote ⁷⁹ Ambiguous Jewish characters also appeared in cinema. David Lean’s movie adaptation of Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1948), featuring Alec Guiness, exaggerated the facial features of Fagin the Jew. In March 1949, Jewish refugees in Berlin staged a protest after the movie was released in the British occupation sector. They saw in Lean’s rendition of Fagin disturbing similarities with Veit Harlan’s Jud Süss. In 1954, a new cinematographic adaptation of George du Maurier’s novel Trilby (1894) popularized once again the manipulative and allusively “Jewish” character Svengali.Footnote ⁸⁰

At the start of the 1950s, however, the Board of Deputies of British Jews held the view that antisemitism in Britain was on the decline. A survey undertaken by Mass Observation in 1951 indeed revealed that in Liverpool, the London working-class district of Whitechapel and the residential London suburb of Golders Green, 54 percent of respondents “had nothing against the Jews” while 14 percent declared themselves “pro-Jewish.”Footnote ⁸¹ With Mosley now dividing his time between Ireland and Paris, only a few “notorious antisemites survived,” observed the Jewish historian Barnet Litvinoff in 1955. “Moribund” in 1956, fascist antisemitism no longer posed a serious threat.Footnote ⁸² British Jews in the late 1950s continued to be occasionally banned from suburban golf clubs, but in 1958 racist animus was directed toward Black immigrants during violent riots in Nottingham and London’s Notting Hill. In the third edition of his celebrated The History of Jews in England, the Jewish scholar Cecil Roth exuded optimism. The old “alembic of English tolerance,” argued Roth, continued to work its magic after 1945: A tolerant country had embraced its long-established Jews and “newer arrivals as well.”Footnote ⁸³ By 1960, British Jews had secured their place in “white” society, although acts of neo-Nazi vandalism in the coming years would once again undermine the safety of the Jewish community.

Austria: Antisemitism in a Victim Nation

Annexed to the Third Reich in March 1938, Austria regarded itself as a victim of German expansionism. It did so with Allied encouragement. Intended to stimulate acts of resistance against Nazism, the Moscow Declaration of 1943 consecrated the Alpine nation as the “first country to fall a victim to Hitlerite aggression.” The document also stipulated that Austria had “a responsibility, which she cannot evade, for participation in the war on the side of Hitlerite Germany.” The founding fathers of the Second Austrian Republic preferred however to interpret the Declaration as a certificate of antifascism rather than a demand for self-examination. Austrian antisemitism was therefore as “null and void” as Hitler’s annexation of the country to the Reich. The first elected chancellor Leopold Figl, a member of the conservative Austrian People’s Party and former Dachau prisoner, assuaged all doubts in June 1947. While “certain Austrians” initially succumbed to Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda, compassion for persecuted Jews had “completely obliterated antisemitism in Austria. I do not believe that the question will ever again have the slightest significance.”Footnote ⁸⁴

After the large wave of emigration in 1938–39 and the death of 65,000 Jews during the Holocaust, Vienna’s prewar Jewish population of 180,000 dwindled to approximately 4,000 Jews who reappeared in the badly damaged city in April 1945. Jewish survivors who returned from concentration camps encountered hostile reception. “There were no kind words,” remembered Gertrude Schneider of Vienna. “Instead, there was the typical exclamation, ‘you people always come back’ and with that we had to be satisfied.”Footnote ⁸⁵ A small number of exiled Jews returned from Shanghai, Palestine, the United States, or Britain, and a few Eastern European survivors settled in Vienna. In 1949, 8,038 Jews were registered with the Jewish community.Footnote ⁸⁶

The reassurances coming from Austria’s leaders contrasted with the testimonies of Jews. “All of us look with dread on the present and the future, which is practically without hope,” reported representatives of the Vienna Jewish Community in March 1946. Were it not for the protection of the four-powers allied occupation, “not one of the 4,000 Jews would be able to appear in the streets.” Vienna, they claimed, was “as before the center of the ugliest and most treacherous antisemitism.” Short-term application deadlines and bureaucratic hurdles impeded the restitution of 60,000 Jewish apartments reallocated to non-Jews during the war. “Among Jews now living in public asylums,” reported the AJYB in the spring of 1946, “are many whose homes are still occupied by former Nazis.”Footnote ⁸⁷

Although not opposed to restitution, Leopold Figl was not inclined to give dispossessed Jews special consideration. There was “no difference between citizens,” Figl told members of the Anglo-American Commission visiting Vienna in February 1946. As he explained, “we only want to be Austrians, equals, irrespective of religion.” Karl Renner, the first president of the Second Republic, did not favor the full restitution of Jewish economic assets. “I do not think that Austria in its present mood,” he confided in early 1946, “would allow Jews once again to build up these family monopolies.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Several restitution laws, however, gradually improved conditions for the small number of Jews still in the country, while Wehrmacht veterans and amnestied Nazis also received help. But Austria’s position was that the “first victim of Hitlerite aggression” did not need to pay special attention to the compensation of Jewish victims or their heirs around the world. Restitution laws were passed, commissions were set up, but many loopholes remained to advantage spoliators. Under Allied pressure, however, the Austrian government deprived hundreds of thousands of former Nazi party members of the right to vote and imposed on them hard penalties. Between 1945 and 1955, People’s Courts launched legal proceedings against 137,000 individuals and convicted to death forty-three war criminals. Yet denazification, largely abandoned after 1948, did not prevent instances of dog-whistling antisemitism in local newspapers.Footnote ⁸⁹

Anti-Jewish antagonism was also palpable within the citizenry. As surveys conducted in 1946 in the American occupation zone revealed, nearly half of the Austrian population opposed the return of Jews who had survived the war in emigration. According to the Mauthausen survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, cinema audiences reacted to newsreels showing the return of Austrian Jews from Shanghai with “raucous laughter […] and exhortations to Gas’em.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Hostility was also rife even in areas where Jews hardly ever lived. In the summer of 1945, the young writer Ingeborg Bachmann described how her romance with a British army officer of Jewish origin shocked her neighbors in the southern province of Carinthia. “Going out with the Jew” was frowned upon yet Bachmann defiantly confronted her neighbors: “I’d walk up and down through Vellach and through Hermagor ten times over with him, even if everyone gets in a stew about it, especially then.”Footnote ⁹¹

Between 1945 and 1951, the transit in Austria of approximately 100,000 Jewish displaced persons exacerbated these negative attitudes. Contrary to the ethnic German “expellees” who simultaneously flooded the occupied country, Jewish refugees from Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, or Poland had no intention to settle permanently in Austria.Footnote ⁹² To remove any doubts, Karl Renner had already made clear in 1946 that after the devastation of the war his government would not allow “a new Jewish community to come here from Eastern Europe and establish itself while our own people need work.” Jewish displaced persons were stigmatized as profiteers enjoying a privileged life in the spa towns of Bad Gastein or Bad Ischl, both located in the American occupation zone. In May 1948, 34 percent of the Viennese population and at least 43 percent of the inhabitants of Linz and Salzburg viewed Jewish refugees as “parasites.”Footnote ⁹³

Hostility toward Holocaust refugees did not only stem from the harsh economic conditions plaguing the war-torn country. Narratives of victimization also stultified empathy. In 1945, Austria’s two leading political parties – the socialists and conservative Catholics – had already crafted their own tales of suffering at the hands of Austro-Fascists between 1934 and 1938 or the Nazis following the Anschluss. Numerous socialists and catholic leaders had been deported to Dachau or Mauthausen while others, like the future Jewish socialist Prime Minister Bruno Kreisky, went into political exile. Both parties cultivated an image of victimized Austrian patriots, a self-identification leaving little room for the distinctive suffering of Jews. In addition, socialists and Catholics competed for the votes of 550,000 former Nazi party members, most of them amnestied by 1948. About 1.3 million demobilized Wehrmacht soldiers and prisoners of war who returned from Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union were also figured in these calculations. In 1955, the Catholic right wooed this constituency by commemorating fallen Wehrmacht veterans as Austrian martyrs. Like the Federal Republic of Germany, the Austrian Second Republic absorbed former Nazis and ex-soldiers within its democratic system. That alone was not conducive to the critical examination of Austria’s role in the Holocaust, despite condemnations of antisemitism from the country’s political leadership.Footnote ⁹⁴

After ten years of four-powers occupation, however, hostile rhetoric against Jews was significantly more muted than in the immediate postwar period. As the AJYB reported in 1955, there were “no overt manifestations of antisemitism” in the newly independent country. Several public scandals would later contradict this assessment. But as the country gained membership into the democratic West, the last remaining Jews in Austria were less preoccupied with hostility or discrimination than with “the indifference of the general public […] to the terrible experience of the Anschluss period.”Footnote ⁹⁵ After a decade of democracy, the main obstacle to normalization was no longer the endemic antisemitism of the immediate postwar years, but an Austrian identity premised on victimhood, Cold War neutrality, and amnesia.

Antisemitism after Nazism: West Germany

On September 20, 1945, soon after the establishment of the Allied Control Council in defeated Germany, all Nazi laws were abolished and the citizenship of approximately 15,000 German Jews still in the country restored. The immense shadow of Nazism, however, continued to affect attitudes toward surviving Jews. “The German people in their majority are still anti-Jewish,” editorialized the Berlin Jewish community magazine Der Weg in February 1947, “and even the newly appointed officials hesitate to extend a helping hand to the Jews.” In 1949, the first US High Commissioner for Germany John McCloy famously stated that the Federal Republic’s stance toward its Jewish citizens would serve as the “real touchstone” of its democratic progress. But the multiple public opinion polls carried out since 1945 in the three Western occupation zones did not indicate improvement. In 1947, 75 percent of interviewees agreed that Jews “belonged to a different race” and nearly as many Germans opposed intermarriage. In the American zone of occupation where most Jewish refugees resided, 18 percent of respondents were found “fanatically antisemitic,” 21 percent were merely “antisemites,” and 22 percent self-identified as “racists.” In Bavaria especially, antagonism against “criminal” Jewish displaced persons or “DPs” was particularly rife.Footnote ⁹⁶ The presence until 1948 of approximately 250,000 predominantly Polish Jewish refugees did not inspire compassion but resentment. The DPs were held responsible for food shortages and black marketing at the expense of starving Germans and millions of “expellees” driven out of East-Central Europe. Through commemorational practices, religious observance but also demographic vitality, Jewish refugees remarkably normalized their lives in the charnel house of Nazism. For many Germans, however, the spectacle of Jewish survival remained an unnerving reminder of guilt.

As Theodor Adorno observed in a group essay published in 1955, a mirror effect between vanquished Germans and surviving Jews transformed German antisemitism into a defense mechanism against “guilt and remembrance.” Less concerned with Jewish racial pollution than with deflection of accountability, a permissible “secondary antisemitism” had since 1945 replaced the tabooed racism of the Third Reich era.Footnote ⁹⁷ After Nazism dreamed of a world without Jews, defeated Germans uncomfortably coped with (few) living Jews in their midst. To be sure, Adorno’s investigation also found citizens who wished for pacified relations with Nazism’s existential enemies. But as Hannah Arendt had also argued in her notorious report on the aftermath of Nazi rule in Germany (1950), most of the public exhibited a “deep-rooted, stubborn, and at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened.”Footnote ⁹⁸ If Arendt mentioned Jews at all, however, it was to commend the population of Berlin for its “frank and detailed recital of what happened to Berlin’s Jews at the beginning of the war.” Arendt otherwise explained the German “flight from reality” as the result of years of totalitarian rule rather than a reaction to the haunting presence of survivors in the country. In distinct but complementary ways, however, Arendt and Adorno illuminated the mechanism of willful ignorance within the West German citizenry.

Yet antisemitism in occupied Germany did not solely manifest itself through evasion of responsibility. Although derogatory comments against Jews were now deemed unacceptable public behavior, blue-collar and white-collar workers, members of the clergy, academics, and government officials continued to propagate negative images of Jews.Footnote ⁹⁹ Verbal or physical assaults on Jewish DPs, as well as the desecration of 200 Jewish cemeteries between 1945 and 1950 alone, also proved that primary antisemitism enjoyed a healthy afterlife after Nazism. This was also true of anti-Jewish rhetoric, tamped down yet never absent from public discourse. In November 1949, the nationalist Bundestag member Wolfgang Hedler wondered aloud “whether the means for gassing the Jews was the best way, about this one can be of different minds. Perhaps there would have been better ways of ridding ourselves of their kind.” A tribunal in Kiel, including two judges who were also former NSDAP members, acquitted the politician. Only after a media campaign was this decision reversed in July 1951.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The birth of the Federal Republic in September 1949 nonetheless imposed a new code of conduct. “After everything that took place in the National Socialist period,” declared its first chancellor Konrad Adenauer in September 1949, “we consider it unworthy and incredible per se that there should still be individuals in Germany who persecute and despise Jews because they are Jews.” Adenauer reduced German antisemitism to the condemnable actions of mere “individuals,” but his reprobation of Jew-hatred legitimated the democratic nature of the Bonn republic. Adenauer, however, ruled out collective guilt in his landmark speech to the Bundestag on September 27,1951. Horrendous crimes were perpetrated by Nazis in the name of Germans, declared Cologne’s former mayor, but “they [Germans] did not participate in them.” The early years of the Federal Republic were nevertheless marked by state-sanctioned efforts to improve relations with Jews domestically and on the international stage. Although hate speech was only criminalized in 1960, legal sanctions were already in place in the 1950s to prosecute acts of antisemitism, even if penalties were generally mild. The process of restitution and reparations to Holocaust survivors and the state of Israel, finalized in the Luxemburg Agreement of 1952, also indicated Bonn’s goodwill. Yet according to surveys, only 11 percent of West Germans approved of the agreement. Pollsters also found that 37 percent of the public wished to see the remaining 30,000 Jews leave the country while a third of the population still held Hitler in high esteem. Other inquiries revealed than more than half of the German adult population claimed to have never witnessed or heard of Nazi crimes. Thirty percent of respondents believed that “the figure of five million Jewish victims” was vastly inflated. While only one-sixth overtly expressed antisemitism, many others preferred not to display anti-Jewish attitudes openly.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Rapprochement with Jews, the German-Jewish émigré Kurt Grossmann observed in 1954, was not “a problem which electrifies the sentiments and minds of the Germans.”Footnote ¹⁰²

Other observers noted in 1955 that while overt expressions of anti-Jewish prejudice were infrequent, “there was much evidence of latent anti-Semitism simmering below the surface in Western Germany, at times to boil over in scarcely disguised fashion.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Throughout the 1950s, numerous scandals and court cases demonstrated the permanence of vocal antisemitism, while more diffuse antagonism lurked behind a wall of silence on German crimes against the Jews. “A kind of invisible curtain,” reported the AJYB in 1957, “still existed between the few and isolated Jewish inhabitants of postwar Germany and their gentile neighbors.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Bonn’s polite pronouncements, elite protests, or student demonstrations against former Nazis in universities or public service, counterbalanced outspoken fanatics of the Third Reich or violators of the antisemitic taboo. But these laudable efforts did not prevent a Judeophobic upsurge in public opinion polls toward the end of the decade. In 1957, three different surveys showed that 30 percent of respondents shared “clearly antisemitic” views. Among self-declared “indifferent” interviewees were many citizens who likely preferred to keep their opinion private.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ “A large percentage of university students” also openly declared their dislike of Jews. Neo-Nazism, while electorally weak, made headlines. The “Swastika Epidemic” of 1959–60, which started with the words Juden raus daubed on a synagogue in Cologne, will mark the culmination of anti-Jewish vandalism in the early postwar period.

From Antisemitism to Tactical Philosemitism

In France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Britain, anti-Jewish resentment surfaced at the end of the war and then declined at the start of the 1950s. Despite foreign admiration for the country’s friendliness, some Italian Jews remained painfully aware of their “latent otherness.” While mostly confined to neofascist circles or traditionalist catholic publications, antisemitic stereotypes in Italy occasionally appeared in the media, cinema, or even among antifascist intellectuals otherwise known for their solidarity with Jewish suffering. In 1960, the communist Salvatore Quasimodo, author in 1956 of the humanist poem Auschwitz and winner of the 1959 Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote of the Jews’ “financial power” and portrayed them as a “race which has never been able to feel tied to a country or a society.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In Austria and West Germany, secondary antisemitism substituted itself to primary Judenhass. Yet everywhere, vocal antisemitism underwent delegitimation in the public realm. Disrepute, however, did not seal off all possibilities to circumvent the taboo. What the French-Jewish philosopher Robert Misrahi called in 1969 “mechanistic philosemitism” was one of these escape routes. After the war, observed Jean-Paul Sartre’s disciple, antisemitism expressed itself through benevolent exculpation of Jews. Their “avariciousness,” for instance, could be blamed on the Church’s prohibition of usury which in the Middle Age turned Jews into moneylenders. Jewish “cunningness” and “bellicosity,” while still assumed to be real, were forgiven as unfortunate results of a long history of persecution. The illegitimacy of overt anti-Jewish expression, argued Misrahi, forced the antisemite “who claims not to be one” into a difficult role: “If too hastily critical of Jews, his mask falls off; if too quickly forgiving, he is unmasked again.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

The migration of negative stereotypes toward pro-Jewish expression was also apparent in early postwar cinema. Prior to 1960, the presence of Jewish characters in Western European films was rare or allusive. While the history of the Holocaust on screen started immediately after the war, most national cinemas began to substantially address the topic in the 1970s. Two films, both released in 1948, nonetheless illustrate how antisemitic themes found a niche in cultural artefacts sympathetic to Jews. In Austria, Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s Der Prozess (The Trial, 1948) told the story of Hungarian Jews unjustly accused of the ritual murder of a young Christian girl in 1882. Rounded up by superstitious villagers, the Jewish inhabitants of the town are put to trial. At great risk to his life, an idealist non-Jewish lawyer sets out to prove the Jews’ innocence. His passionate defense of Jewish villagers exposed the irrationality of antisemitism. The director of two films commissioned by Joseph Goebbels in 1941 and 1943, Pabst now used cinema to condemn anti-Jewish prejudice. For this effort, he received the Best Director award at the 1948 Venice Film Festival. Yet for some critics, his philosemitism was hard to distinguish from antisemitism, since the film accentuated supposed Jewish traits and featured repulsive faces reminiscent of Nazi propaganda. Viewers of Der Prozess, in other words, were invited to identify with persecuted Jews through the recreation of Jewish difference. The gendered “semitic gaze” in German cinema before 1949 fulfilled a similar function. In the few high-circulation films that indirectly addressed Jewish topics, close-ups on “beautiful Jewesses,” highlighting dark eyes, sadness, and a morally untainted Jewish gaze, attempted to overcome the visual antisemitism of the Nazi era through a philosemitism impregnated with racialization.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

In Italy, L’ebreo errante (The Wandering Jew, 1948) showcased similar ambiguity. Directed by Goffredo Alessandrini, a filmmaker who had already enjoyed a successful career under Fascism, the movie featured Vittorio Gassman in the role of Matteo Blumenthal, a Parisian Jew during the German occupation. A temporal flashback at the start of the film reveals that in an earlier period Matteo was a wealthy Jew in ancient Jerusalem who had mocked Jesus on his way to the cross. For this he was condemned to wander eternally. Nearly two thousand years later in wartime Paris, Matteo is a rich Jewish banker who could easily buy his way out of deportation. He nonetheless choses to share the fate of fellow Jews and follows them to a concentration camp. There he leads an escape of prisoners in the company of his female lover Cortese. When Matteo realizes that all remaining Jews in the camp will be murdered unless he returns, the fugitive turns himself in. The film ends in troubling manner: Only after being machine-gunned by the Germans can Blumenthal finally break the curse of the wandering Jew. His martyrdom both encouraged viewers to feel sympathy and interpret the Holocaust as expiation for the Jews’ refusal to embrace Christ. The seventh most popular Italian film for the year 1947–48, L’ebreo errante seamlessly blended philosemitism with anti-Judaism.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

In the immediate postwar period, however, the main form of migration from antisemitism to philosemitism was strategic compensation. Works of Dutch literature challenging the heroic myth of rescue illustrated this phenomenon. In various novels published in the 1940s and the early 1950s, non-Jewish characters feeling shame for wartime inaction romantically longed for Jewish female survivors.Footnote ¹¹⁰ At the level of social interactions, however, the principal site of this transmutation was occupied Germany. In 1945, recalled the German-Jewish exiled historian Peter Gay, the 15,000 German Jews in the country were suddenly treated “with a kind of dirty courtesy, with conspicuous admiration for everything that Jews said, did, or believed.” Jews, he added, mocked the “rediscovered love for everything Jewish (…) as ‘white antisemitism’.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Judenfreundlichkeit (friendliness toward Jews), a punishable crime under the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, was now motivated by opportunism. In September 1945, the literary scholar and diarist of distant Jewish origin Victor Klemperer was visited by the son of a non-Jewish friend, who requested “an attestation that he had been favorably disposed towards the Jews despite his swastika.”Footnote ¹¹² Klemperer had converted to Protestantism in 1912 and viewed himself as a “German and a communist, nothing more.” He nevertheless fulfilled the role of refereeing Jew by helping the young man obtain a Persilschein, a “clean bill of health” and precious certificate of good behavior. At the height of denazification, quipped the satirical right-wing writer Ernst von Salomon in his autobiographical novel Der Fragebogen (The Questionnaire, 1951), “everyone had his own rescued Jew.”Footnote ¹¹³

The opportunistic revalorization of Jews during the Allied occupation stemmed from a reverse balance of power: professed friendliness or admiration for things Jewish helped vanquished Germans meet their occupiers’ expectations. Before foreign visitors noticed a strange “philosemitic fashion” within cultural and intellectual circles at the start of the 1960s, the mutation of German antisemitism into tactical philosemitism during the Allied occupation had already reshaped formerly negative Jewish traits into positive attributes. The Jews’ financial abilities were now an asset for economic reconstruction. Their cosmopolitanism made them perfect mediators with Allied officials. Their “intellectualism” benefited the revival of German culture and science after Nazism. This rhetoric, however, was not always used as strategic ploy. The new democratic Germany, declared the socialist leader Kurt Schumacher in September 1949, should be built with the help of the “Jewish intellect and the Jewish economic potential.” Contrary to Konrad Adenauer’s wish to let bygones be bygones, Schumacher told the Bundestag that the “dishonor” of Nazi crimes will weigh on the nation “for an unforeseeable long time to come”: His stereotypical praise for intellectual or economic Jews was also a rare plea for historical reckoning.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In the mid 1960s, however, German-Jewish intellectuals resented the philosemitic portrayal of Jews as bearers of culture or gifted economic actors, a Judenidolatrie (idolization of Jews) whose seeds were already planted during the years of Allied occupation.Footnote ¹¹⁵ German–Jewish distaste for the idea of “Jewish contribution to German culture,” a laudatory phrase perceived as an attempt to turn the murder of Jews into a German loss, will persist over the next decades.

In occupied Austria (1945–55), the reclamation of [Jewish] modernism in the visual arts helped the country project an image of democracy and Europeanism. Although Viennese Jewish artists and writers had emigrated or perished during the Holocaust, the revival of coffeehouses and cabaret culture likewise turned Jewish absence into coded presence in a city now almost without Jews.Footnote ¹¹⁶ At the level of personal relations, non-Jewish attitudes toward returning Austrian Jews could take the form of sympathy and acceptance. The Viennese Jewish remigrant Erich Lessing, who spent the war in exile in Palestine, found in 1947 “subterranean” antisemitism in his native city but characterized his left-wing circle of friends as “philosemitic.” Yet the writer of Jewish origin Friedrich Torberg, who also resettled in Vienna after the war, felt like a token Jew or “Jud vom Dienst,” although he never used this protected status to challenge the country’s history of antisemitism.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In Austria, as opposed to West Germany, compensatory or whitewashing philosemitism was not a necessity. In order to redefine Viennese culture after fascism, to be sure, Austrian elites imagined Jewish remigrant artists or humorists as embodiments of untainted liberal culture preserved in exile. Yet by definition, the “first victim of Hitlerite aggression” did not owe any idolatrie to its dead Jews or few remaining Jewish citizens.

In Italy, the foreign ministry went at length to convince the Western Allies of the nation’s impeccable philosemitic record. A report issue in the spring and autumn of 1946 in anticipation of the Paris Peace Treaty conveniently simplified the history of anti-Jewish persecution in Italy since the late 1930s. Mussolini’s “racial policy,” stated the ministry, was an aberration at odds with the Italian devotion to “liberty, equality, and tolerance.” Yet Giorgio Almirante, the former supporter of Mussolini’s racial doctrine and founder in 1946 of the neofascist Italian Social Movement, cautiously abjured antisemitism at the end of the war.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In Eight Jews (1944), the first work of Holocaust literature to appear in Italy, the Jewish writer Giacomo Debenedetti commented with irony on the miraculous popularity of philosemitism among former functionaries of the Mussolini regime: “What was the most conspicuous feature of Fascism? Its calling card, so to speak? Its fingerprint? There you go! Persecution of Jews. Therefore, what is the most characteristic indication of anti-Fascism? Protection of Jews.” The most “incontrovertible” proof of democratic morality, the Fascist characters in Eight Jews quickly realized, was to “show sympathy for Jews.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

Tactical or compensatory friendliness, however, was not unique to post-fascist Italy, post-Nazi Germany or postwar Austria. In France, the Catholic writer Georges Bernanos did not abandon his life-long admiration for the anti-Dreyfus journalist Edouard Drumont, “a man of libraries, a man of learning (…) defenseless against the mob.” But to speak favorably of Drumont in 1949 required accompanying homage to “the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Exiled in Paris since 1941, the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran best showcased the mechanism of philosemitic compensation. In 1936, the thinker of French expression born in 1911 had famously lashed out at Romanian democracy for “defending Jews and Judeo-Romanian capitalism.” In his essay Un peuple de solitaires [A People of Solitaries], published in 1956, Cioran reckoned with past antisemitism and flirtation with the fascist Iron Guard movement. “If at twenty I loved [the Jews] to the point of regretting not being one of them,” he admitted, “later on, unable to forgive them for having played a leading role in the course of history, I found myself loathing them with the fury of love turned to hate.” His self-critical essay now valorized Jews to an extreme by heralding their superiority over the rest of mankind. “Man,” he announced, is only a “Jew who did not fulfill himself.” Such dubious compliment paid to a people “exceptional in its destiny” resurrected a radical antisemitic distinction between humanity and Jews, now under the veneer of philosemitism. For the postwar Cioran, Jews were neither “mere mortals [nor] an ordinary variety of the human type”: a mark of esteem still leaving wide open the possibility of contempt.Footnote ¹²¹ Yet if Cioran’s remorseful writings exemplified strategic compensation, post-Holocaust philosemitism is not reducible to mere opportunism or tactics. As seen in Chapter 3, anti-antisemitism did not require special deference or “love” for the Jews. The “war on antisemitism,” whose post-Holocaust roots we now explore, nonetheless became after 1945 a singular marker of philosemitism in European democracies.