Unseen legacy of Nazi ideology: Antisemitism and Islamophobia in modern Europe Article by The Times of Israel

The Times of Israel has published an article by Steven Stern, dedicated to antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe. Caliber.Az reprints this material.   

I have travelled across much of Europe during my adult life, from Great Britain, Portugal, Spain, France, The Netherlands, Denmark, to Greece, Italy, Turkey, to Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland and more. As a professor of Jewish Studies with expertise in European social-political philosophy, I take it as part of my professional duty to come down from the Ivory Tower and go out of my way to meet locals and have discussions about difficult questions. I use dating app friendship requests to arrange meet ups. Often in restaurants, cafes, and bars, I ask ordinary people about how they see the world. Over food or drink, people are very open about their thoughts, if you are genuinely interested and not seeking to judge them. It has been incredibly enlightening to see different perspectives, alternative narratives, and cultural blind spots.

In all those travels, the places in Europe that I have felt most comfortable as a Jew are Copenhagen and Amsterdam. Sadly, Amsterdam no longer. It is not the recent pogrom that first triggered my concerns about Jewish safety there, although, of course, it certainly added to it. No, the trigger was the hostility shown to a Jewish staff member working at Amsterdam’s Anne Frank House. Those overseeing this sacred site—to whom millions make a pilgrimage every year—showed the very hand that once locked Anne Frank in the attic before it was a museum.

The House Administrators instructed a Jewish employee to hide their Judaism. They informed him that he could not wear his kippah at work. The Jewish man appealed this directive to the museum’s board. After six months of deliberation, they told him that he could wear it. Was it ultimately the irony that shamed them into allowing it?

Add this to the recent violence and what do you get? Thousands of Dutch citizens took to the street condemning the horror by singing “Jerusalem of Gold.” Yes, this was moving and is consistent with my earlier sense of the place. But it is just not enough for me. It isn’t that it was an insufficient gesture. The glass now has a crack in it and there seems to be no way it can be repaired. I wish I could, but I just realize that I will no longer feel safe there wearing my Judaism.

The situation is even stranger further east in Germany, where I visited just weeks ago. The country has had to wrestle with their legacy of murdering Europe’s Jews. They have enacted strict hate speech laws. Antisemitism is legally and culturally quashed with laws against word and deed that target Jews. But while they have treated the symptoms, the underlying disease remains. These rules have not satiated Germany’s authoritarian/epistemological thirst for hating non-Aryans in their midst.

In speaking with people in Berlin, I was stunned at the virulent Islamophobia among normal citizens which Germany does little to nothing to curb. And it is not just the Germans, I also spoke with Austrians and Germanic Swiss citizens who exploited the same conspiracies against Europe’s Muslims that were—and still are—used against the few remaining European Jews. 

I could only shake my head at the irony that some of these Muslim immigrants have brought  European Jew hatred with them back to Europe, a Middle East inheritance from Nazi Germany. These people espousing antisemitism are themselves the new heirs to their own version of it at the hands of those who genocidal employed it less than a century ago.

I heard people claim that European Muslims are “dirty, shady, criminals, rapists, sucking our lifeblood from us.” Nazism may be outlawed, but traces of it remain in such utterances. I spoke against their Islamophobia, but did so as an American, not as a Jew. I hid those parts of myself. Calling attention to myself as a Jew worried me. How far away is antisemitism if the same arguments are being wielded against Muslims? Does the recent pogrom in Amsterdam, along with Germanic Islamophobia, show how close it remains?

One might think that after the Holocaust, Germanic leaders would see that millions of citizens are using the same hateful reasoning against European Muslims that was exercised in their destruction of European Jews. In its present fear of and fight against home grown Nazism, Germany cannot hear that its rampant Islamophobia shows Nazism is alive, still woven into the national fabric.

Indeed, their approach to Jew hatred feels authoritarian. It is illegal to identify a German as a Nazi, even one who may have Nazi like views toward Muslims. May we call this Germanic tyrannical-epistemic orientation what it is? Nazism. I

t’s still there in the same way antebellum white ethnic Christian fascism sanctioning slavery informs present day ethnic white Christian nationalism, politics and racism coursing through the veins of American society.

Editor’s note: Dr. Stephen Stern has co-authored The Chailight Zone: Rod Serling Secular Jew, co-authored Reclaiming the Wicked Son: Finding Judaism in Secular Jewish Philosophers, and authored The Unbinding of Isaac: A Phenomenological Midrash of Genesis 22. Stern is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies & Interdisciplinary Studies, and Chair of Jewish Studies at Gettysburg College.

By Aghakazim Guliyev