In the many centuries that Jews have lived in exile, they have time and again left their homes when persecution becomes too severe—not to mention the instances where they have been forcibly expelled. Surveying this history, Tevi Troy sees an important lesson for America:
According to just-released FBI statistics, hate crimes in 2020 reached their highest level in twelve years. Of religion-based hate crimes, 57.5 percent were targeted at Jews, who only make up 2 percent of the U.S. population. These figures, along with disturbing attacks this summer on Jews by anti-Semitic thugs in New York, Florida, California, and other places, have rattled many American Jews. Though American Jews have long been comfortable in America, the sad history of world Jewry suggests that no home for the Jews can be considered permanent. Yet, as the countries that have expelled Jews or encouraged them to leave have learned, things usually got worse, not better, after Jewish populations departed.
Anti-Semitism has a long, ugly history, going back thousands of years. In the 5th through 7th centuries, for example, the Visigoths in Iberia mistreated Jews in various ways, including enslavement and restrictions against intermarriage. These restrictions redounded negatively upon the restrictionists. As Violet Moller writes in The Map of Knowledge, “an increasingly oppressive attitude to their subjects (especially Iberia’s large Jewish community) resulted in stagnation in almost all areas of life. Trade reduced dramatically, there was widespread urban depopulation, and culture shrank to such an extent that some historians have nicknamed them the Invisigoths.”
The new hate-crime figures, as well as the recent and insufficiently denounced anti-Semitic incidents, are worrisome to the Jewish community, and should be disturbing to the nation as a whole. America’s Jews will continue to monitor the situation closely. It doesn’t take concentration camps or expulsion orders to send Jews looking for happier pastures. All that’s needed is for a government and its police forces to look away as Jews get attacked in the streets. We should all hope that the day never comes when the U.S. has to say, as other countries said before it, “We should have kept those Jews.”
Read more on City Journal: https://www.city-journal.org/jewish-population-anti-semitic-violence