What Europe’s history of antisemitism teaches us about religious freedom today

FOREF Europe Commentary

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Freedom of religion or belief is not really tested when we defend communities that society respects. It is tested when a religious minority becomes unpopular enough that discrimination against it begins to seem acceptable.

For anyone working for religious freedom in Europe, there is one history we cannot avoid: the history of antisemitism and, ultimately, the Shoah.

For centuries, Jews have repeatedly been blamed for whatever frightened or angered the societies around them: disease, economic hardship, political instability, military defeat, capitalism, communism, secularism, even modernity itself. The accusations changed with the times. The scapegoat remained remarkably constant.

This does not mean that Jewish suffering somehow counts more than the suffering of Christians, Muslims, Yazidis, Baha’is or other persecuted communities. Human suffering should never become a competition. But Europe has a particular responsibility to remember what happened when prejudice against one religious and ethnic minority developed from social contempt into state policy—and finally into the systematic attempt to annihilate an entire people.

Freedom of religion or belief is not really tested when we defend communities that society respects. It is tested when a minority becomes unpopular enough that discrimination against it begins to seem acceptable.

That history is not as distant as Europeans sometimes like to imagine. Walk past many synagogues during services today and you will still see police vehicles, security guards and protected entrances. Men, women and children are simply coming to worship, yet their place of worship requires protection.

More than eighty years after Kristallnacht, that should disturb us.

What Europe Lost

There is another reason not to speak about Jewish history only in terms of persecution and victimhood.

The Jewish contribution to European and Western civilisation has been extraordinary. Jews represent only about two in every thousand people in the world, yet Jewish scientists, writers and thinkers have received more than one fifth of all individual Nobel Prizes since 1901, with an even higher representation in physics, medicine, chemistry and economics.

Austria has particular reason to remember this.

For several extraordinary decades, Vienna was one of the great centres of Jewish intellectual and cultural life. Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, Gustav Mahler, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig and Arnold Schoenberg helped shape the intellectual and cultural world in which we still live.

They were not outsiders making a minor contribution to Austrian culture. They were among the architects of modern Austrian and European culture.

Vienna would be almost unimaginable without the Jewish writers, physicians, musicians, scientists and intellectuals who helped create its modern identity.

And then Austria expelled, humiliated or murdered much of this extraordinary community.

That contradiction remains difficult to comprehend.

The Long Road from Prejudice to Persecution

Antisemitism did not begin with Hitler.

Its roots reach far back into European history. Jewish refusal to participate in pagan civic cults was already regarded with suspicion in the ancient world. Later, Christian anti-Judaism helped perpetuate the accusation that Jews collectively bore responsibility for the death of Christ.

Over the centuries this contributed to forced conversions, discriminatory laws, expulsions, ghettos, pogroms and accusations such as the blood libel. Jewish communities along the Rhine were massacred during the First Crusade in 1096. Jews were expelled from England in 1290 and from Spain in 1492.

Modernity did not end the problem. It changed its language.

A country could proclaim universal human rights and still persecute Jews. France, birthplace of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, convicted the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus of treason on fabricated evidence and sent him to Devil’s Island.

By the nineteenth century, older religious prejudices were increasingly transformed into racial ideology. Wilhelm Marr popularised the term “antisemitism.” The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious forgery, presented Jews as members of a secret conspiracy seeking world domination.

These developments matter because the Shoah did not suddenly appear from nowhere in the 1940s. There was a long road leading to it.

On 9–10 November 1938, during the November Pogrom—Kristallnacht—synagogues were burned throughout Germany and Austria, Jewish businesses were destroyed and families terrorised. Some 1,400 synagogues and prayer rooms were attacked. Around 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. At least ninety people were murdered during the violence.

What happened that night was far more than an outbreak of mob violence. It announced something fundamental: the state would no longer protect Jewish life and property. Indeed, the state itself had become an agent of persecution.

Once that line had been crossed, much worse became possible.

The Shoah: Six Million Individual Lives

The Hebrew word is Shoah—catastrophe.

On the eve of the Second World War, roughly 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe. Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered around six million of them. Approximately 1.1 million were children. Poland’s Jewish community alone fell from around 3.4 million to a small remnant.

Numbers of this magnitude are almost impossible to comprehend.

For an organisation based in Vienna, Mauthausen brings that history very close. The concentration camp above the Danube near Linz became synonymous with forced labour, starvation, disease, shootings and systematic brutality. Prisoners carried granite up the infamous Stairs of Death.

During the final months of the war, Mauthausen became a destination for prisoners evacuated from camps further east. From January 1945, some 25,000 prisoners arrived from Auschwitz-Birkenau, Groß-Rosen and other camps. In April 1945 alone, more than 11,000 deaths were recorded within the Mauthausen camp system.

Then came the death marches.

As the Nazi camp system collapsed, the SS forced hundreds of thousands of prisoners onto the roads. Of approximately three-quarters of a million people driven on these marches, about a quarter of a million died along the way. Prisoners from Mauthausen were among those forced toward Gunskirchen.

Roads through Austria that today appear completely ordinary once witnessed human beings being marched to exhaustion and death.

Yad Vashem—and the Responsibility to Remember Courage

Yad Vashem, on Jerusalem’s Mount of Remembrance, gives these enormous numbers individual names and faces.

The Hall of Names preserves the identities and stories of victims. The Children’s Memorial commemorates approximately 1.5 million Jewish children murdered during the Shoah. The Righteous Among the Nations honours non-Jews who risked their lives to rescue Jews.

The importance of the Righteous goes beyond remembrance. They remind us that even under a criminal regime, individual moral responsibility did not disappear. People still had choices. Some collaborated. Many remained silent. A relatively small number found the courage to say no.

This raises a question that remains relevant today.

FOREF hopes that future generations will also remember those journalists, human-rights activists, lawyers, scholars and ordinary citizens who had the courage to defend unpopular and persecuted religious minorities in our own time—particularly when doing so brought them little recognition and sometimes considerable personal or professional risk.

This is not to equate contemporary discrimination with the Shoah. Such comparisons must be approached with great caution. The point is different.

Every generation eventually faces the same moral question:

What did you do when people around you were being stigmatized and their fundamental rights were being taken away?

Monuments rightly commemorate the victims. There should also be a place in our collective memory for those who refused to remain silent.

October 7 and the Return of an Old Hatred

One might have expected the Hamas massacre of 7 October 2023 to produce the opposite of what followed. Hamas murdered approximately 1,200 people in Israel and took more than 250 hostages. Jews had just suffered the deadliest single-day attack against them since the Shoah.

By any normal moral logic, such an atrocity should have provoked sympathy for the victims and shame among those who still harboured antisemitic prejudices. At the very least, one might have expected antisemitism to retreat temporarily from public view.

Instead, the opposite happened. Antisemitism increased dramatically.

This is perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of the period since October 7. Jews were attacked, threatened and harassed in countries thousands of kilometres from Israel—not because of anything they had done, but because they were Jews. Synagogues, Jewish schools and businesses became targets. In some cases, hostility appeared almost immediately, before Israel had even begun its major military response in Gaza.

There was remarkably little of the shame one might have expected after such a massacre. Instead, the victims themselves were increasingly confronted with collective blame.

October 7 should have made antisemitism retreat in shame. Instead, it helped expose how deeply the old prejudice was still alive.

None of this places Israel beyond criticism. The policies of the Israeli government, including its conduct of the war in Gaza, are legitimate subjects of scrutiny and debate. That is part of democratic discourse.

But criticism of a government is fundamentally different from assigning collective responsibility to a people. A Jewish student in London, Vienna or New York is not responsible for decisions taken by the Israeli cabinet. Neither is a synagogue, a Jewish school or a kosher restaurant.

Yet this transfer of responsibility has repeatedly occurred since October 7. Political anger directed at Israel has too often spilled over into hostility toward Jews as Jews.

That is the ancient logic of the scapegoat in modern form.

The Horseshoe: When Political Extremes Begin to Meet

Antisemitism today does not come from only one political direction.

On the extreme right we still encounter familiar ideas: race, secret Jewish financial power, the “globalist” conspiracy and replacement theories. On parts of the radical left, hostility can appear in a very different vocabulary, particularly when “Zionist” becomes a general term of abuse applied indiscriminately to Jewish individuals and institutions.

Political scientists and commentators sometimes describe this paradox through the “horseshoe theory.” Rather than seeing the political spectrum simply as a straight line, the theory suggests that at their extremes, radical left and extreme right can sometimes bend toward one another in particular attitudes and behaviours.

The theory is debated, and it should not be used to suggest that the radical left and extreme right are identical. They clearly are not.

But antisemitism provides a disturbing example of how very different ideological routes can sometimes arrive at a similar destination.

The extreme right may portray Jews as secret financiers, rootless “globalists” or racial outsiders. Parts of the radical left may portray Jews—or increasingly “Zionists”—as colonial oppressors whose supposed collective guilt extends far beyond the policies of the Israeli state.

The language is different. The political traditions are different. Yet both can end by treating Jews not as individuals but as representatives of a supposedly guilty collective.

If we condemn antisemitism when it comes from the extreme right but make excuses when it appears on the radical left, we are defending a political camp rather than a human right.

See Also

MEDIA: Framing Faith

The reverse is equally true.

This is not an accusation against conservatism or social democracy, nor does it make legitimate criticism of Israel antisemitic. It is a warning about political extremes—and about the silence of the democratic centre when prejudice becomes politically convenient.

The figures demonstrate the seriousness of the problem. The Anti-Defamation League recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2025, the third-highest annual total since it began tracking such incidents in 1979. Assaults and attacks involving deadly weapons increased, and three people were murdered in antisemitic attacks on American soil that year.

FBI figures put anti-Jewish incidents at around 63 percent of religion-based hate crimes, although Jews constitute only about two percent of the U.S. population. Tel Aviv University described 2025 as the deadliest year for antisemitic attacks worldwide in more than three decades.

The security outside synagogues is therefore not symbolic. It reflects a real threat.

There Must Be No Competition of Victims

Religious-freedom advocates must also resist another temptation: turning persecution into a competition.

Christians today suffer persecution on an enormous scale. Open Doors’ 2026 World Watch List estimates that more than 388 million Christians live under high levels of persecution or discrimination—roughly one in seven Christians worldwide. Researchers counted 4,849 Christians killed for their faith during the latest reporting period, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa.

By absolute numbers, the contemporary persecution of Christians is therefore on an enormous scale.

We must also speak clearly about Muslims, Baha’is, Yazidis, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Falun Gong practitioners and many other communities suffering discrimination or persecution around the world.

Defending Jews does not diminish the suffering of Christians. Defending Christians does not diminish the suffering of Jews.

Religious freedom becomes meaningless if we defend only “our” victims.

The Jewish experience nevertheless carries a particular warning for Europe. Antisemitism demonstrates with terrible clarity how persecution develops. It begins with language and stereotypes. Social exclusion follows. Discrimination becomes respectable. Institutions begin treating a minority differently. Political leaders discover that hostility toward the group can be useful. Eventually measures that once seemed unthinkable become acceptable.

Europe has travelled that road before.

What “Never Again” Requires of Us

This is why remembrance cannot be limited to monuments, ceremonies and annual speeches.

They are indispensable, but they are not enough.

If European societies say “Never Again” at Holocaust memorials while Jews require police protection to enter synagogues, something remains seriously wrong.

And the principle must extend beyond antisemitism.

The real test of freedom of religion or belief comes when defending a community is uncomfortable: when newspapers dislike it, when politicians discover that attacking it is popular, or when society has already decided that its members are strange, dangerous or somehow less deserving of protection.

FOREF has repeatedly seen how quickly public narratives about unpopular religious minorities can harden. Once individuals cease to be seen as human beings and become simply “the Jews,” “the Muslims,” “the sect,” “the cult,” “the fundamentalists” or “the unbelievers,” unequal treatment becomes much easier to justify.

That is why antisemitism is not only a Jewish issue. It is a warning sign for the health of a free society.

The lesson of the Shoah cannot be that Europe should remember one historical persecution while failing to recognise the mechanisms of prejudice when they appear again in different forms.

The lesson must be more demanding:

See the human being first—before the ideology, before the label, before the political argument.

The Jewish family entering a synagogue in Vienna, the Christian family afraid to attend church in Nigeria, the Jehovah’s Witness imprisoned for practising his faith, or the Muslim woman attacked because of her headscarf all possess the same fundamental human dignity.

Freedom of religion or belief either protects that dignity consistently, or eventually it protects nobody.

That is what “Never Again” must mean.

— The Editors, FOREF Europe

 

Related Links

• Hall of Names, Yad Vashem — the archive of faces
• The death marches, 1945
• Mauthausen and the Stairs of Death
• Kristallnacht, 9–10 November 1938

Related reading

• FOREF Europe, Antisemitism as the Universal Scapegoat (13 September 2026)
• Yad Vashem, The Hall of Names and Pages of Testimony (yadvashem.org)
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, Death Marches and Kristallnacht
• Ernő Lazarovits, Mein Weg durch die Hölle (2009) / Vándorlás a pokolba (2007); English typescript: Wanderer in Hell, USHMM.
• Deborah Lipstadt, Antisemitism: Here and Now
• Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews
• Open Doors, World Watch List 2026
• ADL Audit of Antisemitic Incidents (2025)
• European Convention on Human Rights, Article 9

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