The postwar European Jew has been cited as the guardian of memory in Europe, as the conscience of the West in Europe and as a litmus test for that continent’s democracy. As the Jews have no geographical particularity in Europe, and could once be found throughout, some suggest they may even be the truest of Europeans. Yet while the circumstances of Western Jewish experience have often been presented as a means through which to explore group membership, when it comes to European integration Jews have often been silent. Why is this?
I recently interviewed a hundred prominent Dutch, British and Italian Jewish opinion-formers, including communal leaders, and discovered that underneath their prominent positions, thoughts about liquid assets, multiple passports and places to where they might flee, persist. And while a federal Europe might have expected to have been of interest to figures - particularly in mainland Europe – who’d been subject to exclusionary measures from the 1930s until 1945 in the same mainland states in which they have played significant national roles since - their concern that being associated with a post-national Europe might ‘confirm’ the reckless allegations which had cast the Jews as ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ during the late interwar and wartime period, continues.

Not only that, but they fear they’ve remained depicted as a ‘type’ in Europe, and as a type of ‘European,’ outside the norm, and excludable. This is why politically-active Jews across western Europe after 1945 have pursued a staunchly national direction in the public domain, they told me. Many have even made their public criticisms on national identity from ‘safe,’ (that is, non-Jewishly-centred) interest groups or platforms - and have sensed that universalising the relevance of their themes, speaking out as a ‘citizen of democracy,’ and making their concerns generic has been the best approach, fearing that to do otherwise might re-void their entitlement to call their country their home – and see them cast out once again.

For many on the Left, such problems have been on-going. A split after the Six Day War resulted from the Left’s hostile attitude towards Israel, and saw many Jews ejected from what had hitherto been their natural habitat. At the other end of the dominant wing of European politics, the solidarist conservative internationalist brand of Christian thinking, which resonated forcefully among the founding fathers of the European project, was centred on a call for blanket forgiveness, and was a technique used to whitewash Second World War criminals. Here again, Jewish opinion-formers felt depicted as outsiders.

And such feelings persist today, not only among survivors themselves, but also among their offspring, whose parents or grandparents had been expelled from university because of the racial laws in the lands in which they live. Exclusion in countries like the Netherlands and Italy had a profound effect on Jewish families’ afterwar economic and psychological predicament, and it was only during the 1970s that educated, then-young adult Jews felt able to start to redefine their relationship to national society. At this point, ‘feeling European’ just meant not immigrating to Israel, physically, but also mentally. Until then, in continental Europe and sometimes in Britain, many Jews of the older generation had seen themselves as the weak left-overs, who had not dared to go to Israel to develop the new state. A central coping mechanism employed by many such Jews, who continued to live in European lands which had earlier been occupied or fascist, was to imagine that they actually lived in a land which had resisted fascism. They thus mystified the past of their country, in an attempt to deal with living in a space where many had betrayed them, knowing that most who had been involved in the past regimes would never pay for their crimes, and that as Jews there was nothing they could do about this.