Europe needs a good dose of realism - mixed with optimism - The Jewish Chronicle

Last week, a man was murdered in Copenhagen for no other reason than his being Jewish. Last month, four Jewish people were murdered in Paris - again, just for being Jewish.

Jews have maintained a continuous presence in continental Europe for at least 2,500 years, making it one of the oldest if not the most ancient diaspora Jewish community. By contrast, Jews have lived in America for about one-tenth of that time.

This is not to be given up or made light of easily. And, in our present day, the Jewish communities of Europe are immensely significant not just in numerical terms but also in cultural terms. Between 1.5 and 2 million Jews live in our continent, or one seventh of the world's Jews. The community in France is the second largest outside Israel, after the United States, some 500,000-600,000-strong. Other communities of significant size include the United Kingdom with 300,000 Jews and Germany where the size of the Jewish population is estimated at about 120,000.

In cultural terms, Europe's Jewish population is no less significant. Throughout our history, wherever we have settled we have acculturated into the majority, succeeded in producing men and women of excellence, enriched the host nation and achieved distinction far beyond our weight.

Surely we have fulfilled our biblical mission of being a light and a blessing to those around us and it was not for nothing that French Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared on the day after the murder of the four Jews in the kosher market that "France without Jews is not France".

Migrants made Britain a better place

Of course, I must accept that history, culture and influence, however long, brilliant and distinguished, can in the end collapse in the face of brute force and irrational hatred. That lesson we learned in the Shoah, and not for the first time.

So is brute force, or the fear of it, now menacing Europe ?

Jews are faced by three distinct forces: the far left, the far right and Islamists. They all have one thing in common: hostility to Jews.

The far left is a noisy force. In reality, its noise is greater than its numbers or influence. There is a broad coalition of the Socialist Workers Party, Stop the War and associated pressure groups who are anti-capitalist, anti-globalist, anti-America and anti-most things, including, of course, Israel.

Similar far-left groupings are present across many parts of Europe. On their own, I would not regard them as a real threat in most of Europe (Greece being a notable exception), although it is worth mentioning that they may well influence some on the centre-left who regard support for Palestine as the fashionable campaign that fits in with their desire to demonstrate anti-establishment thinking. Some of these people work for NGOs, trade unions and, latterly in the UK, churches.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the far right. While they have been reduced to negligible numbers in the UK, the story elsewhere is very different.

In France, Marine Le Pen's Front National could ride a protest vote into power in 2017. Most French Jews regard that as a frightening prospect.

Elsewhere in Europe, far-right parties have significant representation in Parliament, including in Hungary and Greece, and the lessons from what they say and do is more than enough to justify real fears.

As France has shown, when the recession - which is endemic in Europe and elsewhere leads to low wages, unemployment and financial hardship - combines with large numbers of immigrants, or the perception of large numbers, matters soon lead to a toxic mix in which there is a downward spiral into social breakdown, mistrust of others, resentment and defiance of authority, lawlessness, racism and, inevitably, violence.

Western European liberal values and the laudable desire to help the poor and oppressed have resulted in immigration on a scale previously unimaginable - although if governments had used some intelligence and common sense, this would have been foreseeable.

The result has been the creation of huge immigrant communities across Western Europe. Immigration can of course work positively for the host country. America was built by immigrants. Waves of Huguenot Protestants and Irish people came to England. They were followed by Jews fleeing pogroms.

In the 1950s, we had immigration from the Caribbean. In the 1960s, the Ugandan Asians came to Britain. For decades, the UK has seen significant immigration from its colonies, particularly of Indian Hindus and Pakistani Muslims. There were stresses and strains, occasional violence, racism and hostility but, by and large, these migrations brought a net benefit to the UK. The newcomers came, in the main, with an enviable work ethic and a determination to succeed. Inevitably, they did the jobs that white English people no longer wanted to do.

As we also saw in Israel - a country like America built on immigration - the newcomers integrated pretty successfully, no less so when they retained their separate identities and cultural traditions, and the sky did not fall in on Britain. On the contrary, we can see with hindsight that the mid-20th-century immigrants made Britain a more diverse, tolerant and, by most indicators, a better place. The key, I think, is that they integrated because they wanted to and because they were encouraged to.

But something has changed since the 1980s. Immigration on a hitherto unimagined scale has taken place into countries across Western Europe, including Scandinavia and the Netherlands, where previously it had been on a much smaller scale. Somalis, Sudanese, Ethiopians, Eritreans, Syrians, Libyans, among others from a range of nationalities and creeds arrived. Some were political migrants and some were economic. All sought a better life in the prosperous parts of Europe. The scale of this immigration has predictably brought social dislocation.

Immigration has by no means been limited to people with a different coloured skin. The expansion of the European Union has brought with it huge waves of intra-Europe immigration. The UK has experienced mass immigration of Poles and Romanians. While their stay can be temporary, they, too, have been accused of taking away homes and jobs. Such movements through European boundaries have added to the resentment and racism.

That resentment has been exploited by unscrupulous politicians and demagogues. Witness the rapidly-growing Pegida movement against the so-called Islamification of Europe.

Jews have experienced a by-product of all this. There has been a rapid and sharp hostility to halal slaughter with the consequence that shechita has been swept into the general disapproval. Seeing these trends, I warned some five years ago that it was only a matter of time before there was an attack on brit milah. That attack duly came with the decision of a court in Cologne to criminalise religious circumcision as an unlawful assault on a child. This was quickly followed by copycat actions to suspend circumcisions in hospitals not only in Germany but also in Austria and Switzerland. Chancellor Angela Merkel, to her credit, immediately declared that Germany of all places could not ban milah (as of course the Nazis had done) and promised legislation to uphold the right of Jews and Muslims to practise circumcision. The legislation was duly passed.

A badly carried-out circumcision, even if it was not a Jewish one, could swing public opinion sharply in favour of prohibiting brit milah.

All this adds up to three troubling features of present-day life in Europe. First, the combination of resentment directed towards minorities coupled with aggressive secularism that is a mark of many Western European societies, certainly including the UK, has the potential to prove lethal to our rights to practise shechita and milah.

Secondly, it is noteworthy that the most liberal countries in Europe, notably in Scandinavia, seem to be the most illiberal when it comes to minority faith communities practising their traditions.

Much of the immigration into Western Europe over the past 20-30 years has been Islamic. The overwhelming majority are decent, law-abiding citizens who are prepared to embrace liberal western values and want to integrate into the life of the country.

At the same time, we can no longer hide from facing up to the uncomfortable fact that some sections of our countries' Muslim communities have turned away from integration, or have a version of integration which requires us to subvert our values and integrate ourselves to be closer to them rather than the other way round.

And so to the third and last incendiary factor, which is the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. There can be no doubt about Islamist hatred for Jews (as well as Christians, Bahai, Yazidis, and even other Muslims across the Shia/Sunni divide). In Europe, it is particularly Jews who have been targeted.

But it is not exclusively Jews whom the radical Islamists target. As former Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks says, the politics of hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.

Antisemitism stems from the inability to make space for differences among people, which is the essential foundation of a free society.

Thus what is at stake in the battle against all extremism, including the Islamist version, is nothing less than freedom itself.

Is Europe up to this fight for its future? The response of civil society will now determine the future of Europe. Either our governments will resolutely and effectively take measures to defeat radical Islamism or Islamism will defeat them.

Those who preach antisemitism must be identified, prosecuted, convicted and punished by law. There must be zero tolerance of hate speech, literature and violence, including hate speech disseminated in social media.

New legislative measures may have to be devised to address social media and we must include the role of providers such as Facebook and Twitter, who cannot be allowed to evade their responsibility.

Muslim schools must be rigorously inspected and those that persist in educating children to hate closed down. Our liberal values of free speech must be universally respected. We must insist upon the right to laugh at and mock, while being equally insistent to clamp down on racial and religious incitement, including of course incitement against Muslims. Mocking the Prophet is not incitement, any more than Monty Python's Life of Brian amounted to incitement against Christians.

We are not living in the Germany of the 1930s. Hatred of Jews is not incited or condoned by European governments. On the contrary, they denounce it strongly. Jewish life in Paris is undoubtedly under great stress, but the same is not true of the next largest communities in London or Berlin.

Our societies are perfectly capable of defeating the dark forces of hate. If they show the determination to do so, they will win the confidence of those who vote them into office.

The process of rediscovering faith in our values will be immeasurably assisted if there is support from our Muslim communities.

I have been encouraged to read views by Muslims advocating a re-evaluation of interpretations long held but not debated and challenged. These amount to calls for a reformation, and I have seen that very term used.

Over time, Christians and Jews have subjected their doctrines to reformation and have experienced the renewal of vitality that it brings. As a traditional Jew, I know that re-examination does not mean dilution of orthodox views. On the contrary, nothing is more destructive of faith in Orthodoxy than a refusal to revisit tradition and find new interpretations that speak to the modern world. Far from fearing a reformation, religious Muslims should welcome it because it will strengthen the appeal of Islam to Muslims and others alike. It is not Islam that is the enemy, but jihadism, hate and violence.

As for our response: first and foremost, we must be loud and proud about our Jewish values and way of life. We can only win respect from the outside world if we respect ourselves and our priceless heritage.

For some, that means leaving where we were raised and making aliyah to Israel. As a Zionist Jew with a child living in Israel I say y'shekoach - all strength to you. For some, experiencing antisemitism and fear all too often, in Paris perhaps, or Malmo, and leaving for Israel, London or New York, I respect and support you. For others, leaving is not the answer.

We must invest in and energise our communal life. We must teach ourselves and our children about the beauty and meaning of our traditions and values and we must practise them ourselves wholeheartedly and consistently.

It is said that to be a Jew one must be an optimist. Of course one must at the same time be a realist. Let us all be optimists and realists.