Why Jews Are Fleeing the West

Jewish history has long been defined by migratory movements away from trouble and towards safer places. Over the past half millennia, the safest harbours for ‘the world’s foster children’, as David Mamet put it, have generally been English-speaking countries, first Britain, then especially the US, Canada and Australia.

This is increasingly no longer the case. The British Jewish community is being battered by a rising tide of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish agitation from both the left and segments of the UK’s much larger Muslim population. In Australia, Jewish childcare centres and an MP’s office have been attacked. Even the United States and Canada, where over 70 per cent of the Jewish diaspora resides, are showing signs of increased anti-Zionist and openly anti-Semitic sentiment. Indeed, in the US, anti-Semitic hate crimes now dwarf hate crimes against Muslims, blacks or Asians. No wonder many Jews are thinking of departing for safer pastures new.

The potential decline in the Jewish Anglosphere has been presaged by a more precipitous fall in Europe and throughout Asia. The Jewish population in Europe stood at 3.5million in 1950, after the Holocaust. Today it has fallen to well under 1.5million. France is home to the world’s third-largest Jewish community, but it’s shrinking. Since 2000, nearly 50,000 Jews have left France, mostly for Israel. Even more shocking has been the virtual annihilation of Jews in Islamic countries – one million strong until the 1960s, there are fewer than 15,000 Jews living in these places today.

Anti-Semitism, driven by attacks from Islamists and their leftist allies, has been a prime driver of this decline. A survey found that barely 13 per cent of anti-Semitic attacks in Europe were traceable to right-wingers. To be sure, there’s cause to worry about some right-wing anti-Semities within the ranks of Austria’s Freedom Party (founded by former SS officers), the AfD in Germany and Jobbik in Hungary. But right now, the immediate danger lies elsewhere.

Until recently, the Anglosphere provided a bulwark against anti-Semitism. As Barbara W Tuchman explains in Bible and Sword, Jews have long had ties to Britain, reaching back to before Roman times. In 1290, Edward I did announce the expulsion of Jews, but many returned largely at the behest of Oliver Cromwell in the 17th century. Cromwell’s Roundheads drew a lot of their inspiration from the Old Testament. Of course, at the same time, Britain’s Jews have suffered considerable discrimination over the past half millenia, and were unable to vote in parliament until 1858.

In the late-19th century, Britain’s Jewish population swelled thanks to migration from Russia-dominated regions in Europe’s east, notably Poland. Many helped shape the British left, and the Labour Party, while others went off to participate in Britain’s robust economy, including as migrants to the colonies, notably South Africa, Australia and Canada.

But over the past half century, the Jewish population in Britain has declined. Today, with central London often resounding to the sound of pro-Hamas demonstrations, a vibrant centre of Jewish life has been turned into a no-go zone. As secular Jews migrate or intermarry, one study predicts that England’s Jewish community will largely be Orthodox by the century’s close.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

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Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: D. Berkowitz via Wikimedia under under CC 2.0 License.