From Barcelona to Regensburg, it’s never been too difficult to find the location of the historic and medieval Jewish quarter in most European cities. Almost invariably, it’s in the dead center of the oldest part of the city, often adjacent to the city’s cathedral.
European monarchs, bishops, and princes liked to keep their Jews close, and the Jews knew that without this watchful eye of the ruler, they would never be safe from the mob.
Not that this central location was really much of a permanent protection. The prince or the bishop would not hesitate to inspire the local town’s folk to a pogrom once in a while – or simply expel all the Jews.
This was Jewish life in Europe in the Middle Ages from England to Poland, across the Rhine, and over the Pyrenees.
A history of the Jews having no right to self-protection
Jews had no autonomy and no right to self-protection. If they behaved, paid the special exorbitant taxes for being Jewish and demanded no rights, they might be free to go about their daily lives. For a time.
None of this, of course, prevented or reduced antisemitism, the religious Jew hate that has morphed over the centuries into racial and then political Jew hate. And it didn’t stop Jews from being murdered, right through to the ultimate attempt at extermination of Jews in the Holocaust.
Eventually, both the Jews and the rest of the world came to understand, for a short time, that the only way Jews could really be in charge of their own destiny and keep their own lives was by protecting themselves, with their own national self-determination and their own state.
Not for nothing do Israeli fighter jets traverse the skies above Auschwitz every year on Holocaust Remembrance Day – a star reminder that had there been a Jewish state in the 1940s, fewer Jews, or perhaps no Jews, would have been incinerated. But that worldwide awareness no longer exists.
TODAY, THE ivory towers of international justice once again believe that Jews should have no agency over the protection of their own lives.
Terrorists, murderers, rapists, and child killers are now to be given free reign over Jews, and the world will not only turn a blind eye but do everything in its might to prevent the Jews from stopping it.
For Europe and the international community, this isn’t a return to the Middle Ages, it is a return to the Dark Ages.
How else to explain the perverse decision of the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to seek arrest warrants for those who work to stop Jews from being murdered?
How else to understand that arrest warrants were never issued by the ICC against Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, leader of the world’s foremost terror-state sponsor; or to Syria’s President Bashar Assad, who has presided over the massacre of more than 500,000 civilians in Syria over the past 12 years? No warrants yet for the leaders of Burma or North Korea? What’s keeping the ICC?
AND THEN, to compound that decision by direct comparison between murderer and victim, as if placing the prime minister and defense minister of a democratic country on the same balance sheet as a bunch of fundamentalist terrorists and murderers indicates a fair comparison.
What is it about one tiny Jewish state that the moment it seeks to defend its own people – bound, of course, by the demarcations of a society governed by democracy and the rule of law – the ICC immediately seeks to prevent it so doing?
It appears to be the same perverse logic that sees Israel targeted by more UN General Assembly resolutions than the totality of Syria, North Korea, the People’s Republic of China, Russia, and Venezuela and all other countries combined.
We’ve been here before and over many centuries.
The best and most effective way to get rid of Jews is to disable their agency to act in their own defense. In medieval times, Jews were the targets of local mobs during blood libels against them [as today]; now they are [also] targets for the international mob when murderers and rapists invade their one and only safe space.
We must call this by its name: Hating and murdering Jews is antisemitism.
Enabling the continued hatred and murder of Jews, denying the victims the agency to stop it, and couching it in the terms of international law is no less.
The writer is president of the European Jewish Congress, the representative organization of European Jewry.