A group tracking antisemitism in Germany said Tuesday that it documented 2,480 incidents in the country last year, just under seven incidents per day on average.
In its annual report, the Department for Research and Information on Antisemitism, or RIAS, said that while it registered a slight decrease in antisemitic incidents in 2022 compared to the year before, there were nine incidents of extreme violence, defined as “potentially fatal or serious acts” – the highest number of such cases since nationwide record keeping began in 2017.
Those extremely violent crimes include a shooting at a former rabbi’s house next to an old synagogue in the western city of Essen last November. Germany’s federal prosecutor is now investigating the case along with two other violent antisemitic crimes on suspicion that they may have been carried out in cooperation with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
More often, however, “it is everyday situations in which Jews are confronted with antisemitism,” Benjamin Steinitz, the head of RIAS, told reporters in Berlin.
These incidents can take place anywhere from work to home, to public transport, in the supermarket or at a concert. Such “every day” antisemitic incidents have diverse political backgrounds and often include trivialization of the Holocaust, in which Germany’s Nazis and their henchmen murdered 6 million European Jews.
Dr. Josef Schuster, President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, commented on the findings, saying they show that “anti-Semitic incidents are an everyday phenomenon in Germany. In general Jews in Germany feel safe. However, we can see that the greatest threat emanates from the extreme right. But antisemitism appears in virtually all forms of extremism. This development is particularly worrying.”
RIAS’ numbers were lower than those of the Federal Criminal Police Office (Germany’s equivalent of the American FBI), which reported in February that it had recorded 2,639 antisemitic crimes over the course of 2022 — a decrease from the more than 3,000 such incidents it had tallied in 2021, when soaring tensions in the Middle East led to a spike in antisemitism.
In its report, RIAS stated “there was no systematic, comprehensive cross-checking with police statistics in 2022” and that “antisemitic crimes that only came to the attention of the police were therefore not included in the statistics.”
However, both sets of data showed an increase in violent incidents even as the overall numbers went down. According to the police numbers, 88 incidents of anti-Jewish violence were recorded in 2022, up from 62 the previous year.
Antisemitism isn’t new for German Jews, noted Stephan Kramer, a former general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany who now serves as head of the domestic intelligence agency of the German state of Thuringia as well as the deputy chairman of the local community.
“The numbers of RIAS are pretty accurate (reflecting the real situation) to my feeling, because they show more and detailed than most other statistics what is going on,” Kramer said.
“Although we have to clear that most Jews don’t report every incident, because they don’t feel it’s understood and taken care of, or they don’t want to be on record with all the personal data, which might endanger them even more, because the offender finds them even better.”
Last December, Germany unveiled its first national strategy to combat antisemitism, which was embraced by the Central Council of Jews in Germany and European Jewish Congress.
According to RIAS, many antisemitic hate crimes include common tropes linked to Jews or conspiracy theories such as the coronavirus pandemic with its anti-Jewish narratives and the Middle East conflict with antisemitic criticism of Israel.
A 2021 report by the European Commission found that the worldwide outbreak of Covid-19 had ushered in “a new wave of antisemitic conspiracy theories and hate in Europe,” with anti-Jewish motifs proliferating in French and German-language posts online.
Every fifth antisemitic incident has a conspiracy background, according to what RIAS documented. A right-wing extremist background was involved in 13 percent of all incidents, while 53 percent of the incidents could not be clearly linked to a specific political background.
RIAS’ report came only days after a far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) candidate won a vote to become a district leader in Thuringia’s Sonneberg district, a breakthrough for the party which has hit record highs in national polls.
While far-right parties have gained ground around Europe, the strength of the AfD is particularly sensitive in Germany due to the country’s Nazi past.
The AfD “uses conspiracy talk” about a “deep State and a world conspiracy also against Germany,” said Kramer, worrying that “this will lead to more antisemitism in the coming months and future.”
