Dov Maïmon argues that Jews in Europe find themselves caught between liberal democracies that promise protection but that can fail to deliver it, and authoritarian regimes that deliver security but are capricious. He warns that authoritarianism can seem appealing if liberalism fails to live up to its promise and shield Jews from antisemitism.
I was born in Paris and lived there until I left for Israel at 18 – for Zionist reasons, not because I had to flee. In the Paris of the 1970s, I never encountered antisemitism. Being Jewish then was, if anything, enviable. It meant Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Philip Roth. The leading French intellectuals were mostly Jewish: Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut, André Glucksmann, Emmanuel Levinas. To be Jewish was to be at the centre of Western intellectual life, not its margins.
I remember the sentence that mattered most to me then, even as I was finding my way towards authenticity and Zionism. It was the slogan students chanted in May 1968 at the Sorbonne, amid the student uprising and the arrest of one of its leaders of German background: ‘Nous sommes tous des Juifs allemands’ – ‘We are all German Jews.’ It wasn’t just a declaration of solidarity. It was an aspiration. To be Jewish meant carrying the weight of critical thought, of exile as a form of conscience, of refusing to accept the given order of things.
That was the world I left behind when I made Aliyah. I didn’t leave because Paris had become too dangerous. I left because I wanted to build something, to live as a Jew in a Jewish state, to participate in the Zionist project. It was a choice made from strength, not fear.
Now, everything has changed. A colleague who recently returned from Budapest told me something that beggars belief: today, it’s safer to wear a kippah in Budapest than in Malmö, Brussels, or Paris – the Paris I grew up in. Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, leads a government widely criticised as authoritarian and illiberal. It is a paradox of history that Jews, especially those who are easily identifiable, can feel safer there than in some liberal capitals of Western Europe.
The statistics confirm the paradox. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), only 17 per cent of French citizens hold antisemitic views, compared to 42 per cent in Hungary. And yet, 52 per cent of Jews in France say they worry about being physically attacked, compared to just 12 per cent in Hungary. In France, nearly three-quarters of Jews say the Israeli-Palestinian conflict affects their sense of safety; in Hungary, it is fewer than one in ten. Since October 7, antisemitic incidents have surged dramatically across Western Europe, but no comparable increase has been recorded in Hungary.
How did we get here? How did liberal democracies – political systems built on protecting minorities, individual rights, and the rule of law – become places where Jews increasingly feel unsafe, while illiberal regimes appear to offer a measure of security?
WHEN THE EQUATION BREAKS
On January 27 2026, the Israeli government hosted representatives from several far-right European parties. Outrage was immediate among Diaspora Jewish communities and Israeli liberals alike, and in many cases entirely warranted, with accusations of moral blindness, betrayal of Holocaust memory, political short-sightedness. How could the Jewish state, born from the ashes of European Jewry, engage with political currents historically associated with exclusion and ultra-nationalism?
In France, that question carries particular weight. Parties on the far right do not arrive in politics as blank slates. For many Jews, and for many official Jewish bodies, certain movements carry legacies that make ‘normalisation” feel not merely imprudent but dangerous. Outrage, in that sense, is not a fashionable reflex. It is a moral alarm shaped by European history.
The fury also rests on an assumption Jews have carried for two centuries: that liberalism equals Jewish security. Emancipation dismantled ghettos, granted rights, and opened doors. Even the Zionist project itself – and the founding ethos of the State of Israel – was deeply aligned with this worldview: belief in the autonomy of the individual, national self-determination, and the idea that a people should be free to shape its own destiny. Jews were among the greatest beneficiaries of liberal democracy’s promise, particularly its commitment to minority rights and legal equality. Liberalism did not merely tolerate Jews; it enabled an unprecedented flowering of Jewish civic, intellectual, and political life.
But that equation no longer feels reliable to many Jews – at least not everywhere, and not uniformly.
In France, and in parts of northern Europe, antisemitic violence has intensified while the experience of protection has weakened. Jewish students face harassment framed and justified as political expression. Synagogues operate behind security. Wearing a kippah can require calculation. These are no longer marginal experiences; they have become familiar features of Jewish life in places that once felt self-evidently safe.
More troubling still is the ideological shift. Antisemitism is increasingly reframed as political critique, social protest, or resistance to power. Jews are often excluded from the moral category of vulnerable minorities. The very frameworks designed to protect them can struggle to recognise them as victims.
It is tempting to declare that ‘liberalism has failed.’ That is too sweeping – because Europe is not one legal system, one political culture, or one pattern of enforcement. What is true, however, is that in some liberal societies the interaction of law, institutions, and cultural hesitation can produce outcomes that Jews experience as abandonment.
Structurally, liberal democracies place individual rights – especially freedom of expression and due process – at their centre. These principles are indispensable. They also impose real constraints. Governments must draw careful lines between protected speech and unlawful incitement, meet evidentiary standards, and respect procedures. In common-law systems, the moral intuition behind that caution is captured by Blackstone’s principle: it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer. Those safeguards are not a bug; they are the point.
The challenge is what happens when antisemitism rides the boundary between speech and intimidation. In practice, this can produce delay, ambiguity, and unevenness – precisely when threatened communities crave clarity.
Here, the differences between countries matter. The U.K., for example, has shown that when violence is unambiguous – riots, physical disorder, direct attacks – the state can act quickly, including mass arrests and prosecutions. At the same time, protest movements that mix lawful demonstration with intimidation create harder legal and political judgments, even when there are hundreds of arrests and significant policing. Germany, too, has often been forthright in drawing red lines, including bans, robust policing, and deportations in certain cases.
By contrast, where intimidation becomes routine, where enforcement appears inconsistent, and where daily life is shaped by ambient threat, Jewish confidence deteriorates. France, Sweden, and Belgium are frequently cited by European Jews in this regard.
Culturally, there is also a reflex that can blunt moral clarity: antisemitism is increasingly dissolved into explanation. Violence is contextualised, sociologised, and relativised. Crimes are rationalised by their ‘root causes,’ and too often framed as symptoms of inequality or geopolitical frustration rather than as moral violations that demand and deserve punishment. Understanding replaces judgement; nuance replaces enforceable limits.
This reflex has consequences. When antisemitic acts are treated primarily as social phenomena rather than as crimes, perpetrators learn that there are no clear lines – that they are shielded by the fog of justification. Meanwhile, Jewish fear grows as a rational response to repeated hesitation, which teaches them they are on their own.
There is also a sensitive dimension that many people argue is still discussed too indirectly in parts of Europe. In several countries, official reporting has repeatedly noted links between some violent antisemitic attacks and Islamist radicalisation. Yet institutions often address this pattern with heightened caution, mindful of stigmatisation and political misuse. When public language becomes consistently guarded, Jewish communities can feel that the diagnosis is being softened precisely where precision matters.
Silence is not neutral. When violence carries little consequence, it repeats. And when it repeats, Jewish life contracts into itself.
Most recently, antisemitism has become camouflaged as anti-Zionism. Jews are recast as powerful and rapacious colonialists, undeserving of protection. Their vulnerability is dismissed as manipulation. Objections to harassment are transfigured as attempts to suppress free speech. In this inversion, freedom protects those who threaten Jews, while Jews are accused of abusing it.
HUNGARY’S CONTRAST – AND ITS LIMITS
Hungary offers a starkly different case. Public order is enforced more aggressively and boundaries are drawn more quickly. Antisemitic violence is treated as a crime, not as a phenomenon requiring endless sociological preface. The state acts swiftly when red lines are crossed.
Such systems do not necessarily reduce prejudice, but they can restrict its expression in the public square. Security stems less from moral consensus than from clarity, deterrence, and enforcement.
My colleague walking through Budapest was not describing a philosemitic paradise. He was describing a state that enforces limits. Prejudice may remain – even at higher levels than in France – but it does not metastasise into routine public harassment in the same way.
We need to be absolutely clear-eyed about what this means and what it doesn’t mean. The protection offered by illiberal regimes is contingent, dependent on the narrative and agenda of whoever holds power. Orbán may find it useful today to position Hungary as a friend to Jews and Israel. Tomorrow – or under different leadership – that could change quickly.
We see this dynamic with brutal clarity elsewhere. In the United States, figures like Tucker Carlson — once a fixture of mainstream conservatism — now openly platform Holocaust revisionists and traffic in conspiracies about Jewish power. The same populist movements that claim to defend ‘Christian civilisation’ can pivot quickly, turning nationalist rhetoric against Jews when it becomes politically useful. Their commitments are not universal but contingent, driven by expediency rather than principle.
History offers no comfort here. Authoritarian regimes that protect Jews today may have no difficulty abandoning or targeting them tomorrow. The protection is not grounded in the inherent rights of the person, but in a patronage that can be withdrawn at will.
SOVEREIGNTY AND THE ZIONIST INSIGHT
Israel’s outreach to parts of the European right reflects more than cynicism. It reflects an insight at the heart of Zionism itself: Jews cannot deposit their security indefinitely in the goodwill of others. Sovereignty is not a luxury; it is a necessary condition.
Zionism spread on the recognition that liberalism, however noble, could not guarantee Jewish safety in moments of crisis. Self-determination includes the right to draw boundaries, to defend the collective, and to prioritise survival when abstractions fail.
For many Jews, the current shift in the political calculus is not a rejection of liberal values in theory. It is a response to their perceived erosion in practice.
THE IMPOSSIBLE CHOICE
We cannot trust illiberal regimes to protect Jews in the long term. Their commitments shift. The prejudices they suppress rather than confront remain available for political mobilisation. Today’s friend may be tomorrow’s oppressor.
But we also cannot continue to pretend that liberal democracies are fulfilling their promise when Jewish life is increasingly governed by calculation, guardedness, and fear – at least in countries where intimidation has become routine and enforcement feels inconsistent. Security is the most fundamental right: without it, liberal freedoms are fragile. If minorities are not genuinely protected, liberal ideals risk becoming theoretical – and credibility erodes.
The tragedy is the choice itself: between systems that protect contingently and systems that, in some contexts, struggle to protect consistently.
Unless liberal societies recover the courage to draw clear lines, enforce boundaries, and recognise antisemitism for the Jew-hatred it is – even when it comes wrapped in fashionable language – more Jews will conclude that contingent protection is better than none. That conclusion, more than ideology, more than politics, is what is redrawing the map of Jewish life in the West.
