The murderous antisemitic terrorist attack against the synagogue in Halle, Germany, in 2019, in the holiest day of Yom Kippur outraged many people, but for many different reasons. Some - locals, politicians and everyday people probably - because they were reminded of a fact that this time went out of any control. Many, on both sides knew that the incident was just one of the many in a long line of events that were perpetrated every single year since 1945, more than once, all over Germany - be it federal or communist.
Ronen Steinke, German journalist by Süddeutsche Zeitung, collected all those facts and figures about attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions perpetrated continuously since 1945. In Terror gegen Juden, this chapter has 89 pages and it ends the book but I was too curious to wait until the end and went a couple of times through all of the incidents. I knew a couple of them, but I was reading about some of them for the first time. My personal experience is not relevant anyway as I´ve spent a bit over a decade here, but think about people having to deal on a daily basis since their birth with a situation that, as the very well documented shows, it actually never changed. The only new aspect is that to the old right and left anti-semitism - with representatives of both wings getting their stages of terrorist training in Palestinian camps in Lebanon or Jordan - is that in the last 10 years or so, there is added a new threat coming from extreme Islamists. Most probably this last development is convenient for those trying to convince the larger public that the refugees brought antisemitism and increased the number of attacks against Jews. In fact, vandalized cemeteries, synagogues on fire, Jewish lives being lost to terrorist attacks were a reality long before that traumatic event.
The mixture of people who are hating to death Jews in Germany is bizarre, colourful and always toxic. From the communitarian idealists, to eco-fascists, pure neo Nazis - including among the police forces - and Islamists. Those marching and shouting Al Quds events were in fact saying loud what many everyday Germans may strongly believe. The reluctance of taking a firm stance against the BDS movement is based on the fact that actually there is a good slice of the German population which supports the ideas expressed by that movement.
The book doesn´t address particularly the situation in the communist Germany other than by mentioning the frequent cases of cemetery desecrations, but it does not mean that it was much better, as both the German communists and their STASI allies purposely assumed. The fact that so many right wing ´identitary´ movements are currently nested in Eastern part of the country shows that, no matter where one may look within Germany, the so-called de-nazification - both institutionally and at the level of mentalities - was never a political priority and therefore never fully achieved.
What Ronen Steinke outlines in his book, based on facts and legal realities, is that too little have been done for approaching in a coherent way this constant phenomenon of the post-war Germany. Among which the inconsistent, if any, support of the state for an outstanding security concept of Jewish institutions and synagogues, as well as the lack of a coherent legal approach of attacks aimed at Jews - including the lack of a proper legal definition of antisemitism.
The book is more than a random reading about post-war antisemitism, but it includes a couple of useful suggestions that I wish to live long enough to see them accomplished at the institutional level, among which harder punishments for antisemitic attacks and hate crimes in general, de-neo-nazification of the police - I dare to say that not only the police is sharing such mindsets, and this is not only the case of Germany - a legal argumentation of the judiciary that does not offer such a generous space of expression and manifestation to antisemitic perpetrators and last but not least a higher security for the Jewish institutions - educational, religious, social.
There is so much to say and write on this topic. Way too much. But it´s fantastic to notice a new generation of Jewish writers and scholars and journalists who are not giving up, no matter the reason.
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