Survey: Anti-Semitic attitudes
are prevalent all across Europe

What goes around comes around and is very much at home in Europe.

NEW YORK, Oct. 29 (JTA) — More than one-third of the people in Belgium, Germany, France and Spain hold strongly anti-Semitic views, according to two surveys conducted for the Anti-Defamation League.
The figures show that “all of Europe is infected” with anti-Semitism, said Abraham Foxman, the ADL’s national director.

Some 39 percent of Belgians and 37 percent of Germans harbor strongly anti-Semitic views, according to the ADL’s index of anti-Semitism.

In France, 35 percent were strongly anti-Semitic, and in Spain 34 percent. The figure fell to 23 percent in Italy, 22 percent in Switzerland, 21 percent in Denmark, 19 percent in Austria, 18 percent in the United Kingdom and 7 percent in the Netherlands.

The results of the surveys will be discussed later this week at an ADL conference on global anti-Semitism in New York.

Anti-Semitic attitudes in France, Germany, Denmark, the United Kingdom and Belgium were surveyed in June 2002. Attitudes in Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and the Netherlands were measured in September and are being released this week.

The ADL calculates attitudes based on an “anti-Semitism index” that monitors responses to 11 statements deemed by University of California researchers in 1964 to indicate ani-Semitism. Respondents who agree with six or more of the statements are considered “most anti-Semitic.”

Statements included the canards that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their home countries, use shady practices to get what they want, care only about other Jews and prattle too much about the Holocaust.

Five hundred interviews were conducted in each country.

The survey released this week found that, overall, 40 percent of respondents think Jews have too much power in international financial markets. That number was highest in Spain, with 71 percent, and lowest in the Netherlands, where 18 percent believed it.

A majority — 56 percent — of respondents in the five countries recently surveyed see Jews as more loyal to Israel than to their home countries. That number skyrockets to 72 percent in Spain.