Action plan of the Biden administration against anti-Semitism on American campuses, indignation of the German vice-chancellor, environmentalist Robert Habeck, against the extreme right and “part of the left” after an increase in anti-Semitic incidents, a tearing of the French left… The reactions to the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7 and to Israel’s military response in the Gaza Strip have relaunched the debate, in Western societies, on the forms of anti-Semitism. And, in particular, on the extent of a possible “transfer” of the latter towards the left, under the cover of a radical criticism of Israeli policies.
In December 2019, the National Assembly voted, against the opinion of the left, which was concerned about an assimilation between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, a resolution in favor of the adoption of the operational definition of anti-Semitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which encompasses “manifestations of hatred towards the State of Israel justified solely by the perception of the latter as a Jewish community”. It is in particular from this definition that a team of social science researchers from King’s College London, led by Daniel Allington, started to try to measure the intensity of anti-Semitism, in the plural, and to discern their roots.
For this, the researchers developed an index deployed in two subscales, each measured by a score of 1 to 5 based on respondents’ reactions to six points of view. The first subscale, “Judeophobic anti-Semitism,” assesses anti-Semitism based on prejudices that predate the creation of the State of Israel: “Jews cannot be trusted in business,” “Jews have too much power in the media”… The second subscale, “anti-Zionist anti-Semitism”, attempts to measure “irrationally extreme anti-Israeli positions and ‘old’ anti-Semitic attitudes adopted in connection with Israel and its supporters rather than with Jews as Jews”: a respondent will, for example, have a score that is all the higher the more they agree with phrases like “supporters of Israel control the media” or “Israel does to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews.
Since 2020, this Daniel Allington team has led several statistical surveys on samples of 600 to 1,800 Britons, including the last was published last spring in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. On a scale of 1 to 5, they arrive at an overall anti-Semitism index of around 2.4, higher for what concerns anti-Zionist anti-Semitism (a little less than 2.7) than for Judeophobic anti-Semitism. (a little more than 2.1). The index is a little higher among 18-25 year olds, notably because anti-Zionist anti-Semitism is higher there (more than 2.9), without the researchers deciding between an age effect (which would therefore disappear over time) or a generation effect. Men and women display the same overall index, but Judeophobic anti-Semitism is stronger among the former, anti-Zionist anti-Semitism being higher among the latter. Anti-Semitism is stronger for its two components among non-white people, even if the researchers believe that the weakness of the sample makes the interpretation of its magnitude difficult. It also tends to decrease with the level of diploma, but this is especially true for its Judeophobic variant.
The originality of this study is that its authors also probed political personality traits to detect their possible correlation with anti-Semitism and, if so, which one. Ethnic nationalism is thus a good predictor of Judeophobic anti-Semitism, but not at all of anti-Zionist anti-Semitism. Belief in conspiracy theories is found in both cases, but in different forms: global conspiracy and/or conspiracy affecting personal well-being (for example, the existence of secret medical experiments through vaccines) in the case of Judeophobic anti-Semitism; government conspiracy in that of anti-Zionist anti-Semitism. The same goes for authoritarianism: Judeophobic anti-Semitism is correlated with a form of right-wing authoritarianism, characterized in particular by submission to conventions and an appetite for strong power; anti-Zionist anti-Semitism, to left-wing authoritarianism, characterized conversely by an unconventional attitude and a feeling of “anti-hierarchical aggression”. This very last feeling, this “desire to overthrow the social order”, also constitutes a predictor, in a more diffuse way, of Judeophobic anti-Semitism. And, therefore, one of the best determinants of global anti-Semitism, linked to a “rude anti-elitism”.
Researchers note, more generally, a moderate correlation (estimated at 0.34 on a scale of 0 to 1) between the level of Judeophobic anti-Semitism and the level of anti-Zionist anti-Semitism: on average, the more a person is one, the more they are the other, but this does not does not mean that one correctly predicts the magnitude of the other. A conclusion which resonates with other recent statistical studies which have attempted to assess the scale and porosity of different forms of anti-Semitism. In the United States, the NGO Anti-Defamation League (“Anti-Defamation League”) concluded last year from a study of 4,000 individuals to a “substantial” correlation between the expression of Judeophobic and anti-Zionist tropes, but especially among older people, less among young adults: the overall intensity of anti-Semitism was stronger among 18-30 year olds, but the lower number of young adults wearing it simultaneously in its two variants.
Overlap between the expression of Judeophobic and anti-Zionist tropes depending on the ages.
© / ADL
In France, we also find this observation of partially uncorrelated anti-Semitism in the last report of the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights (CNCDH) on the fight against racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia, published this summer. Its authors identify three forms of anti-Semitism. The first, the most present, is “old anti-Semitism”: an ideology manifested by respondents who think that Jews have too much power or a particular relationship with money, and who also find themselves, quite often, displaying a negative opinion of Israel – in the sense of the country in general, not of its government – or to think that the Israelis are responsible for the continuation of the conflict. The two other profiles are, for one, an anti-Judaism characterized by a violent criticism of the Jewish religion without link to Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict nor to old anti-Semitic stereotypes; for the other, “a new anti-Semitism, […] structured by criticism of Israel, without leading to adherence to traditional anti-Semitic clichés”. An “old” anti-Semitism and a “new”, which are both characterized, here too, by a different relationship to authority.
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