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Anti-Semitism in Europe is back

A spectre that many hoped had all but disappeared has returned to haunt Europe.

The spectre is anti-Semitism, and it has caused great disquiet in the two largest countries of the European Union, Germany and France.

Add to that the stain of coded, and in some cases openly anti-Semitic, language in countries farther east in the EU, and the outlook is darkly clouded.

A personal experiment led to the incident that triggered such foreboding in Germany.

A 21-year-old Israeli-Arab student, Adam Armush, living in Berlin, donned a kippah, the kind of skullcap worn by orthodox Jews, and walked out on April 17 with a friend, largely to prove to himself that rumours of anti-Semitism were a myth.

Instead, he was set upon by three young men, one wielding a belt and yelling “Yahudi,” meaning Jew in Arabic, as they beat him. Armush videoed his own attack on his phone.

That video posted online caused an uproar and consternation. Police quickly arrested a 19-year-old Palestinian refugee from Syria.

here are 100,000 Jews now living in Germany (in 1933, when Hitler took power, there were 500,000) and most, according to the World Jewish Congress, came to the country from countries in the former Soviet Union in the last generation.

And now, many are afraid. The attack on Armush was not an isolated case.

In 2017, according to German government statistics, there were 1,468 anti-Semitic incidents reported in the country.

In France, anti-Semitism is also front-page news, in the form of an extraordinary manifesto published on April 22, a manifesto “against the new anti-Semitism.”

More than 250 French political and intellectual leaders, including a former president and three former prime ministers, signed it.

Its warning was sobering. It talked of “an almost soundless ethnic cleansing” in the European country with the largest Jewish population — approximately 500,000. It came after the latest murder of a Jew in late March.

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