Jews Are Being Told to Hide in Berlin. Again.

BERLIN — Before the Nazis came to power, 160,000 Jews lived in Berlin. They were vastly overrepresented in the arts and sciences, in medicine and law. Today, the community has around 8,000 members. There are no Nobel laureates, like Albert Einstein or Paul Ehrlich, the physician who invented the first antibiotic in 1909, among them.

But today’s Jews are apparently not invisible enough. There were 1,270 antisemitic incidents in 2023, the majority after October 7.

In reaction to this surging violence, Berlin’s police chief, Barbara Slowik, issued a warning not to the criminals, but to the Jews.

“There are parts of Berlin where I would advise people wearing a kippah, or who are openly gay or lesbian, to be more alert,” she said. “In certain districts there is a majority of Arabs who sympathize with terror groups and hate Jews,” the capital’s top cop added. The German antisemitism research outfit RIAS put it more brutally: “There are hardly any spaces where Jews could feel safe.”

Nor is this just a German problem. Look at London, Paris, and, most recently, Amsterdam, where well-organized Muslim assailants hunted down Israeli soccer fans who had come to cheer on Tel Aviv’s Maccabi team. Thirty of them were wounded, and Israel sent planes to bring home many of its soccer aficionados.

Frau Slowik surely meant well: Take care. Don’t provoke. Stay safe. But this is a perverse reversal of the role of police officers, who are supposed to protect vulnerable citizens. Surely the right thing for a police chief to do is to warn against those who would assault Jews and gays in her city. Instead she urged self-erasure to the would-be victims.

How did this become Berlin’s reality? You can’t answer that question without looking at the numbers.

There are some 5.5 million Muslims in Germany—and only 118,000 inscribed members of the Jewish community. Retired chancellor Angela Merkel famously opened the country’s gates in 2015, letting in about a million migrants, the majority from Islamic countries like Syria. “Wir schaffen das,” Merkel declared. “We can do this.”

How does that promise hold up?

In 2023, 41 percent of all criminal suspects in Germany were immigrants—almost three times more than their share of the general population (15 percent). The answer to why is multifaceted, but let’s single out one factor among the immigrants from Islamic lands: Young unattached males make up the bulk from the Middle East and North Africa.

As we know, such youngsters are prone to risk-taking and mischief—no matter their religion or nationality.

An additional German feature makes things worse: Whatever their background, newcomers often cannot work because of rigid labor rules that require vocational certification. For example, it does not matter whether a recent immigrant has a perfect traffic record as a truck driver. After six months in the country, he has to get a German driver’s license—or use a cargo bike for deliveries. Nor do immigrants have to work, given Germany’s munificent welfare state.

In the U.S., illegal immigrants can find millions of jobs in a far less regulated economy, which favors assimilation. But in Germany, integration is more challenging—and young Islamic men would rather spend time with their own or in the mosque.

In these houses of worship, young Muslims don’t just learn piety. The Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (Germany’s domestic security agency) has discreetly recorded some of the sermons. For instance, the imam of Berlin’s As-Sahaba mosque has thundered: “May Allah annihilate all those filthy non-Muslims—Christians and Jews—because they hate Islam.” That obviously includes the State of Israel.

In view of its Nazi past, Germany does not intrude; it is religious freedom über alles. (Still, when talk segues into incitement, the government does intervene. Last summer, it closed down Hamburg’s Islamic Center, also known as the “Blue Mosque.” The charge: aiding and abetting terrorism. Throughout the country, several affiliates have been declared verboten because of ties to Hamas or Hezbollah.)

Add into this mix Islamic studies centers in universities generously supported by regimes in the Middle East. These are not generally dispassionate scholarly institutions, but outfits teaching “postcolonialism” and the sins of the West—Israel above all.

Perhaps this sounds familiar to American (or British or Dutch or French) ears. The vast majority of people on both sides of the Atlantic want tighter controls on immigration and the speedy deportation of malfeasants. Due process and asylum laws, among the West’s noblest attainments, render such wishes brittle, legitimate as they may be. Though dented by Donald Trump’s trifecta (winning the White House and both House chambers), the faith of those who dominate elite culture—postcolonialism, cultural relativism, and wokeism—will not quickly fade.

Back to the Fatherland, formerly the engine of deadly Jew-hatred. Polls measure less than 20 percent of the general population holding antisemitic views. This is decidedly less than in Poland (48 percent) and Hungary (42 percent).

Given Germany’s murderous past, the country relentlessly makes amends. Last year, just days after October 7, the federal government doubled its subsidy for the Central Council of Jews to 22 million euros, a bit more in dollars. It is heartening that Germany keeps funding lots of Jewish museums and staging a plethora of commemorative rituals, like “Never Again” pledges on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the first nationwide Nazi pogrom in 1938. Berlin sells U-boats at a steep discount to Israel, submarines that are one leg of the country’s nuclear triad. (The other two are American state-of-the-art strike planes and homemade long-range missiles.)

That’s the good news. The bad news? Surging antisemitism imported from the Middle East and North Africa. Plus demography: The Jewish community is literally dying. If the current rates of decline persist, Germany will be judenrein at the end of the century.

Hiding religious symbols, as Berlin’s police chief advised, is just a well-meaning Band-Aid, unless the powers that be get serious about arresting, prosecuting, and deporting malfeasants, and taking a hard look at what is being taught in mosques and Islamic centers—including those at publicly funded universities—and closing them down, like Hamburg’s Blue Mosque and its affiliates throughout the country.

In the U.S., the rethink started before Trump II. But look at the Netherlands after the Amsterdam soccer pogrom. The government reacted in horror—it must not happen here! And yet Amsterdam will honor the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant against Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is charged with crimes against humanity. So will London and Canada.

Is this unconscious antisemitism? Let’s put it this way: Given the global and singular condemnation of the Jewish state in the name of “anti-Zionism” after October 7, it is hard to ignore what may be the real thrust. After the Shoah, unalloyed antisemitism has been strictly verboten in the West. But sublimation, repression, and projection do come back, Dr. Sigmund Freud has taught. And Israel sure makes for a handy substitute for the Jew. But this time, the Israel Defense Forces pack more punch than the armies of Germany, France, or Britain.

Josef Joffe is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He has published widely and has taught politics at Harvard, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins.

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