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I was in Bordeaux recently. It is a beautiful and underrated city. That weekend the riot police were out in force expecting a violent demonstration by the gilets jaunes. They fenced off the

cathedral in Case of attack. Walking around the city a friend and I encountered a member of the gilets jaunes. He looked at me and called me “un juif et con.” We walked on in case there were

others around.

This was my first direct experience of antisemitism. Not online or through social media, but directly in person. I had just been reading Stefan Zweig’s Journeys (Pushkin Press), a selection

of travel essays written between the 1900s and 1940. What is striking about these essays is the total absence of Jews until the last essays, written in the late 1930s. Zweig, a Viennese Jew,

was more interested in cathedrals and the twenty or thirty church towers in Catholic Salzburg than the Jewish world of Galicia or Bukovina. There are no references to Jews here at all until

the last few pages.    

Suddenly, Zweig’s mood darkens. He starts to notice Jewish refugees, stateless and destitute, “the homeless and exiled”. These last essays are deeply moving accounts of what’s happened to

the European civilization Zweig grew up in. By then Zweig had himself become a refugee. On 30 June 1940 he left his beloved Europe for good, never to return.

It is easy to criticise Zweig. How could he have missed what was happening under his very nose? Easy but unfair. After all, what would to take for us, now, to start to pack our cases and

look for a safe place to move to?

The New York Times, of all papers, prints an openly antisemitic cartoon, by an artist who has previous form. Do you remember a previous work in which he took a famous image of Polish Jews

being rounded up in the Ghetto by Nazi soldiers and turned it into an image of Palestinians being rounded up by Israelis?

In San Diego, only a few months after the Pittsburgh shooting, one Jew is killed and several wounded in a shooting in a synagogue. In Britain, the Labour Party is led by someone who turns a

blind eye to Jew-hatred among his own followers. Every day I see antisemitic images or tweets. This week, Len McCluskey wrote of the need for solidarity with Palestinians. “What about

Muslims in China,” I wrote to him, “the poor in Venezuela, Christians in north Africa, gays in Iran?” No answer, of course.

France recently commemorated the third anniversary of the Islamist attacks against Charlie Hebdo and a supermarket in Paris. One of the largest Jewish communities in the world has seen

growing antisemitism over the last twenty years, particularly since 2015.  There is now an 18-24 month waiting list for British people applying for German passports.

In Daniel Quinn’s The Story of B, he describes the story of the boiling frog:

“If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, it will float

there quite placidly. As the water gradually heats up, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a smile on its face, it will

unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.”

Should Zweig have heard the alarm bells sooner and started writing about the plight of the Jews in Europe? Should the frog have jumped out of the pan sooner? What needs to happen before Jews

take action? How many synagogue shootings in America? How many violent attacks in France? How many vile images and messages on social media in Britain? How many antisemitic cartoons in The

New York Times or vile cartoons in The Guardian?

In Alan Isler’s superb novel, The Prince of West End Avenue, Isler creates an old Jewish man who looks back on his past in Europe. He was so confident that nothing could happen to the Jews.

His family respected his wisdom. He was so intelligent, such a man of the world. Surely they should follow his advice and stay. Read Isler and Zweig and wonder what else needs to happen.

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