“Jewish life belongs to Germany.” Few phrases are invoked more often in discussions of German-Jewish relations. It sounds like a promise, a reassurance, sometimes almost like a declaration of faith. Yet the more often it is said, the more pressing the question becomes of what it actually means. The very frequency with which this formula is invoked points to an unresolved tension. Its constant repetition appears to compensate for a deeper, largely unspoken unease. The assumption that this unease originates with Jews themselves and merely reflects the insecurity of Jewish life in Germany, however, falls short. In reality, it reveals a deeper discomfort within German society about its own past, of which Jews are inevitably perceived as a living reminder.
In political discourse, the focus often seems to be less on real Jews than on a particular “idea of Jews.” In this sense, Jews serve above all as the yardstick by which Germany measures its own claim to be a decent and democratic country despite its “difficult history.” At times, Germany’s commitment to “protecting Jewish life” appears as little more than a matter of duty, performed diligently, yet quietly experienced as a burden. This discrepancy becomes visible not only in political rituals but also in everyday life. For years, Jewish activists have pointed out that Jews in Germany are largely perceived in three roles: as mascots of intercultural dialogue, as objects of hostility in debates surrounding Israel, or as victims of the Holocaust. As a result, German-Jewish relations are marked by a persistent unease and deep-seated reservations.
Paradoxically, this insecurity often goes hand in hand with a striking degree of confidence, for example, when politicians quick to express indignation debate the legitimacy of Israeli retaliatory strikes or public intellectuals pronounce with great certainty on whether Auschwitz should be regarded as historically unique. The root of this imbalance lies less in a lack of information than in a resistance to experiences that do not fit the preconceived picture. Representative surveys repeatedly show how strong the desire for moral exoneration in Germany is and how limited the knowledge of one’s own family history often remains. Around 18 percent of Germans claim that their ancestors helped Jews during the Nazi era, for example by hiding them.
Historical research, however, paints a very different picture. Even generous estimates suggest that the share of those who actually assisted Jews in hiding amounted to only about 0.2 percent of the population. Yet this limited historical awareness is met not with humility but with a passive-aggressive sense of expectation. Against this backdrop, it is striking how confidently and loudly German society places demands on what is often described as “schützenswertes jüdisches Leben” (“Jewish life worthy of protection”). The sheer number of requests directed at Jewish communities, organizations, and their representatives speaks volumes: “Jewish life” should not be too Zionist, it should remain suitable for moral admonition and remembrance, and it should stay compatible with interreligious dialogue.
For many Jews in Germany, however, Israel is not a distant political issue but an essential element of collective security and identity. This is particularly true for Jews with Eastern European family backgrounds, who make up the large majority of the community. Their families were shaped by experiences of Soviet antisemitism or earlier waves of persecution in Eastern Europe. For them, anti-Israel rhetoric rarely appears as a purely abstract political disagreement. It often resonates with experiences of exclusion and older patterns of antisemitism, and therefore carries a particular historical weight that many outside these communities underestimate.
The Expectation of Moral Superiority
This arrangement works as long as the “Jew worthy of protection” fits the expected mold and there is agreement on what his legitimate needs are. It starts to unravel, however, as soon as Jews articulate their everyday fears and concerns about security, about radicalized Muslims or postcolonial agitators on university campuses. Suddenly Jews are seen as unreliable, politically instrumentalized, or as having taken a political wrong turn. In this constellation, Jews are not perceived as subjects with their own lived experiences, but as extras in a scripted moral drama. Jews may speak as long as they reaffirm what is already believed to be right. Once they deviate from that script, they lose their role.
Interestingly, voices that fit prevailing expectations often receive disproportionate attention in German public discourse. In several prominent cases, these have been left-leaning American or Israeli Jews whose hostility toward Israel resonates strongly with German audiences. While publishing in major newspapers and appearing on talk shows, they often lament the supposed suppression of dissenting voices. In practice, however, such outside commentators are readily welcomed in the German debate, as their interventions make it easier to portray more conservative and security-oriented positions within local Jewish communities as unjustified attempts to “exploit German guilt.”
This imbalance becomes most apparent where outrage is selective, as sympathy for victims of antisemitism at times depends less on the person attacked than on the identity of the perpetrator. When Jews are attacked by a white neo-Nazi, the outrage is immediate and widespread. The image fits, the lines are clear, and it is easy to take a moral stance. The moral calculus changes, however, when antisemitism surfaces within progressive ranks or among those perceived primarily as victims of racism. This is where the relativization begins: everything is placed “in context,” followed by the familiar admonitions not to generalize, not to instrumentalize, and not to “play into the hands of racists.” Concern then shifts away from the Jews who have been attacked toward the political hygiene of one’s own worldview.
German essayist Eike Geisel once captured this expectation with biting irony. Germans, he argued, have come to view Auschwitz as a kind of “reformatory” for Jews.1 The victims themselves are expected, in retrospect, to demonstrate that something morally meaningful could still be salvaged from the senseless machinery of extermination. Not despite Auschwitz, but precisely because of it, Jews are expected to behave in a particular way. They are expected to be better people and to have internalized a “never again” that is increasingly understood today as an obligation to exercise restraint even in the face of antisemitic terror, much of it perpetrated by radicalized Muslims. Confronting such antisemitism too forcefully, however, would challenge the multicultural self-image of contemporary Germany as an open and tolerant society.
In this context, it is not difficult to imagine the “bad Jew”: the one who refuses the role assigned to him. He is not conciliatory, nor willing to reinterpret the violence directed against him and his community as the expression of deeper social forces. Instead, he insists on self-defense, on Jewish solidarity, and on the right to express anger and demand justice for the wrongs inflicted upon him. Above all, he disrupts the comforting belief that something morally redeeming emerged from the catastrophe. The “bad Jew” refuses the pedagogical expectation. And that is precisely the provocation. Once Jews can no longer serve as a moral lesson, the entire arrangement begins to falter.
The urge for exoneration and the relentless search for “Jewish guilt” are not marginal phenomena but a central mechanism for deflecting guilt in postwar Germany. The supposed crimes of others provide a convenient escape from confronting the crimes of one’s own ancestors. Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that slogans such as “Free Palestine from German guilt” found particular resonance and that antisemitic mobilization began even before Israel could respond to the October 7 massacre to protect its population from further attacks that had already been announced.
The expectation of moral superiority turns into aggression when it is disappointed. Jews who refuse to chasten themselves or to join the demanded criticism of Israel will be disciplined accordingly. One interlocutor succinctly described this impossible situation: “I wish more people in this country would treat us like ordinary people, and not as symbols or projection screens for their own conflicts.”
Will There Still Be Jews in Europe in Twenty Years?
After October 7, it became clear how deeply these reaction patterns are entrenched in German society and how fragile the supposed German-Jewish normalcy truly is. Many Jews had expected that the brutality of the massacre and its openly genocidal intent would preclude any relativization; that the sheer scale of the violence would persuade even those who had long resisted all arguments. Instead, hatred of Jews exploded, with deadly consequences around the world.
Images of mutilated bodies and of those abducted to Gaza did not primarily evoke sympathy but intensified existing hostilities. Antisemitism persisted not despite the suffering but, disturbingly, because of it. In conversations, the same image was drawn again and again: sharks that smell blood and begin to circle their prey. This image captures the unsettling realization that Jews, once they show vulnerability, will not be protected. They become targets. When suffering becomes visible, it does not restrain hostility but instead fuels it.
Many also described a climate in which their grief was not recognized as such but immediately relativized or weighed against the number of victims in Gaza. Against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising that many Jews are considering leaving Germany altogether. The future of Jewish life in Western Europe is no longer an abstract question. In neighboring France, around 50,000 Jews have emigrated over the past decade, many of them moving to Israel, according to figures from the Jewish Agency. Germany is harder to quantify statistically, but anecdotal evidence suggests a comparable trend. Many younger Jews are considering leaving, often for Israel or the United States. The motivations may vary—security concerns, political frustration, or simply the search for a more stable future—but the underlying question remains whether Jewish life can continue to flourish in societies where hostility toward Israel and Jews is increasingly normalized.
Several European governments have recently moved toward recognizing a Palestinian state, a step often driven less by diplomatic strategy than by domestic political calculations. For many politicians, the issue is increasingly shaped by electoral arithmetic, with a combination of antisemitic sentiment among segments of the political left and among parts of Muslim communities becoming an influential factor in public debate. Governments worry not only about votes but also about unrest in the streets. In such a climate, affirming gestures toward the “Palestinian cause” can appear politically advantageous, even when they run counter to the security of local Jewish communities. In Germany, such a policy still seems unlikely. Among older generations there remains a sense of historical responsibility or, if not that, at least a reluctance to damage Germany’s carefully cultivated postwar image. Yet demographic change and the sharp rise in antisemitic incidents may well shake this fragile equilibrium.
At the same time, Germany is increasingly shaped by political and intellectual currents that transcend national borders. Paradoxically, the country’s deep integration into transnational institutions and its embrace of an increasingly “internationalized” political culture have also created channels through which forms of antisemitism already visible in international forums such as the United Nations can gain influence. This is no longer the old, traditional hatred of Jews, but rather its postmodern and politically respectable variant. Increasingly, younger Germans who study abroad and move within international academic, corporate, and policy networks adopt these frameworks as well.
In Germany, uncertainty is growing, and an increasing number of Jewish parents are wondering whether they can still raise their children in Germany and send them to regular schools. In some of these schools, out of consideration for the sensitivities of Muslim students, the Holocaust is addressed only cautiously or avoided altogether. Many Jews are increasingly retreating into Jewish circles, not out of a desire for isolation, but out of necessity. The reemergence of separate professional associations for Jewish journalists, academics, and lawyers is itself a sign of how much public space has narrowed for Jews.
Jews are often described as the canary in the coal mine, though many are unaware of what the metaphor actually implies. When Jews begin leaving a society because of rising antisemitism, it signals more than the dangers of “brain drain”—the loss of figures like Freud, Einstein, Zweig, or other “lost talents” often invoked in German popular culture in connection with flight and exile. Rather, it points to a central insight that is still insufficiently acknowledged: antisemitism poses a threat to freedom, democracy, and the Western way of life as a whole.
Precisely for this reason the broader society should be far more concerned, not out of well-meaning sympathy, but out of sober self-interest. For where Jews are attacked, the very order that places law above power and allows dissent will sooner or later begin to break down. If hatred of the liberal West, with Jews often cast as its agents, continues to grow without resistance, the embattled Jews of Europe will settle elsewhere. Jewish history offers many such examples. In the long run, this has usually harmed the societies that rid themselves of Jews or watched it happen in silence.
Ultimately, every Jew is evidence that somewhere in their family line someone once made a conscious decision to remain Jewish despite violence, exclusion, and persecution, despite the tempting option of assimilation. Sometimes this meant abandoning a place of residence after centuries in order to pursue a Jewish future elsewhere. The Jewish path was rarely the easier one, yet it was chosen again and again. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks described Judaism not in its narrow religious sense as a system of beliefs, but as a shared story unfolding across time. This civilization has survived, while the vases and jewelry of the Romans and the mummies of ancient Egypt can now only be admired in museums.
This article is an extended version of a piece originally published in the German journal Zeitzeichen. The author gratefully acknowledges Eric Fraunholz for his assistance with translating this essay.
Topics: Israel Initiative • Reflections & Dialogues
Alexandra Farkas Bandl is pursuing her doctorate in Leipzig, with a focus on East-Central Europe, Jewish history, and the political cultures of state socialism in Hungary. She also leads a Jewish and Zionist organization for young adults.
Eike Geisel, “Die Banalität der Gesinnung,” in Die Wiedergutwerdung der Deutschen: Essays und Polemiken (Berlin: Edition Tiamat, 2015), p. 116.