It is a sad fact that what kings and rulers tried in vain to do, we are succeeding to achieve by ourselves. There is an old Yiddish saying “S’is schwer tzi zayn a Yid,” which means “It’s hard to be Jew.” That’s why I have enormous admiration for those who are Jewish by choice.
My task as a journalist is to raise and discuss questions that Jews should care about, and I believe that the subject of assimilation is on the mind of a large segment of Israel’s population.
This is why I am examining the relationship between antisemitism and assimilation.
A history of antisemitism and Jewish assimilation
Through the ages, there have been efforts to eliminate the Jewish people or, at best, to force them to denounce their Jewish beliefs. There was time when they were enslaved, as in ancient Egypt. Jews have also been abused as in Greece, under king Antiochus, who tried to Hellenize them. He desecrated the Jewish Temple, and prohibited circumcision, the study of Torah, and our dietary laws. Then came the Romans. Following the Jewish revolt against their oppression, king Titus captured Jerusalem in 70 CE. He destroyed the Temple, killed many Jews, and scattered the rest all over the Roman Empire to undermine their power by causing assimilation.
After the emergence of Christianity, Jews fared no better. In 380 CE, Roman emperor Theodosius decreed Christianity to be the official state religion of the Roman Empire. The western Roman Empire began to disintegrate in 476 CE but continued in the East as the Byzantine Empire, where Jews experienced a punctured tolerance. After the Byzantine defeat by the Ottomans in the 15th century, when Islam became the official religion, Jews had a period of relative prosperity but also suffered sporadic persecution, arbitrary confiscations, attempted and forced conversions, and pogroms initiated by the Muslim rulers.
In Europe, where Christianity took hold, antisemitism became rampant. In 1190, the Jews sought refuge in the castle tower of the city of York in England, under the protection of king Richard I, but they were murdered by an angry mob after the king left the country to go on the Crusades. However, those were not the only murders of Jews that were perpetrated in the Middle Ages. In 1492, the Catholic monarchs of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, issued the infamous Alhambra Decree, aka the Edict of Expulsion, expelling all Jews who would not convert.
Fast forward to the late 19th to early 20th century. France was rocked by an antisemitic scandal. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army, was falsely accused of passing military secrets to the Germans. He spent several years in prison. Then after another trial, he was pardoned in 1906 and reinstated in the army. Dreyfus died in Paris in 1935. To this day, France is a hotbed of antisemitism.
Persecution of Jews has been a major part of our history throughout the Diaspora communities.
One of the most recent initiations of Jewish persecution started in Germany, where antisemitism was covertly simmering in the Weimar Republic from 1918 to 1933. When the Nazis rose to power in 1933, they used this simmering antisemitism, which led to the Holocaust.
There are cases of Jewish Holocaust survivors who, following the end of the war, returned to their original homes in Poland and were set upon and killed by their former neighbors. In the Kielce pogrom of July 4, 1946, the lives of 42 Jews were lost, which included a newborn baby and a pregnant woman. Despite the protestations by Poland’s government today, there is no future for Jews in Poland, a country whose long and documented history of antisemitism extends to this day.
The establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 was given as the reason for making economic life for Jews in North Africa and Middle Eastern states impossible, and 850,000 had to flee their homes and become refugees, without any international recognition to this day. Arch antisemite Antonio Guterres, secretary general of the United Nations, does not speak up for them as he does for the so-called Palestinian refugees. But despite him and his clique, we have a strong State of Israel, a shield for all Jews, that will not allow a repetition of state-sponsored persecution of Jews.
Unfortunately, even in the year 2025, hatred of Jews is still much in evidence all over Europe and in many parts of the Muslim world, as experienced in our own country in October of 2023, voiced and acted out with physical violence, rape, and the brutal murder of 1,200 people.
Regarding this history of repeated attempts to assimilate or totally eliminate Jews and Judaism, its culture and belief from the face of the Earth, Jews have one protector. Baruch Hashem, He has seen to it that the Jewish nation, even if depleted, has always experienced the demise of its persecutors.
Empires have come and gone, and so have republics and other regimes that were all engaged in practicing antisemitism and encouraged assimilation; but against all odds, we are here. However, today, Jews face three great challenges, all beginning with the letter A: antisemitism, assimilation, and apathy. The first two are easily discernible, but apathy is even more important because it allows assimilation to happen. It is extremely sad that today, Jews themselves are attempting to complete what others have failed to do.
Apathy, a seemingly innocuous weapon, is more dangerous than any gun. It condones increasing intermarriage, which is damaging the Jewish world and has reached a reported 70% in the United States.
In 2020, the Knesset Research and Information Center presented figures showing that 60% of European Jews have been lost to assimilation since WW II.
Russia, where today’s Jews seem to have a weak Jewish background, topped the chart with 75% of intermarriage. That’s why they are easy prey for Christian missionaries.
ONE ORGANIZATION at the forefront of the fight against assimilation is Yad L’Achim. Yoav Robinson, head of the organization’s Counter Assimilation Department, says that assimilation is exacting a huge toll in Israel, which will reach 15%. This is happening for several reasons:
- When the Soviet Union opened its borders, some 660,000 non-Jews moved to Israel because of immigration laws that were based on the Nazi race law. This meant that if they had one Jewish paternal grandfather, they were designated as Jewish – even though Jewish law does not recognize this.
- The large number of foreign workers in our healthcare industry form a large reservoir of non-Jewish women, who have entered relationships with Jewish men, and thereby have non-Jewish children.
- Thousands of Muslims with Israeli citizenship move freely among us. Islam prohibits intimate relationships before marriage; therefore, it encourages young Muslim men to pursue Jewish girls.
Dozens of our young women, especially from dysfunctional homes, are deprived of any love and guidance, so they naively fall for the compliments and attention of Arab men. Thereafter, they become psychologically and emotionally captive. Once ensnared and invited to their boyfriend’s village, they are trapped. They are forced to convert to Islam, and then to marry and have children.
According to Robinson, these Arab families are pro-Palestinian, despite being Israeli. So where knives and guns don’t do the job, what better method to hurt the Jewish people than to take their daughters captive?
After many years of being locked up and mistreated, the women may be trusted to go out alone just to collect their Social Security and child allowances from the post office. It is then that they may look for and call the Yad L’Achim hotline. The social workers make contact and meet them the following month and assess the situation. It’s a process. All the field team are from elite IDF commando units and are fluent in Arabic. They know the culture and customs, and they dress as locals in order to rescue these women and their younger children, who are attached to their mothers.
The women are cared for in one of several safe houses for at least a year. They are helped to find a suitable job or learn a profession until they are able to cope on their own. Their “Jewish” teenage sons usually identify as Muslim and do not want to leave teir home. However, Yad L’Achim tries to make contact and invite the older children to learn about their Jewish heritage.
Interviews and lectures with such women, at home and abroad, particularly in France, are an effective means of preventing young Jewish girls from the dangers of these relationships with Arabs.
Does that also happen in ultra-Orthodox families? It does, says Robinson, and their numbers are increasing. This is extremely surprising in Orthodox families, where the movement of young girls is strictly monitored. Robinson stresses that because in these families such subjects are never talked about, until marriage looms parents are not aware that their younger daughters might be in danger. One also never sees this subject discussed in the secular media because being so controversial, it may upset that part of the Jewish community which condones “marrying out.”
According to a report researched and compiled by Prof. Sergio DellaPergola of the London Institute for Jewish Policy Research and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the number of European Jews (although much higher than in the Middle Ages) varies greatly within Europe due to assimilation.
“Assimilation” is a wide-ranging term that covers intermarriage, conversion by missionaries, leaving the religious family tradition, even living in a totally non-Jewish environment, and more. The data shows the proportion of intermarriage to be much higher than participation in Jewish community life. It is, however, very different in Belgium and the UK, for example, due to the significant number of religious communities there.
According to this report, the return to religion in the Jewish community in central and southern Europe is higher among the young families than those in the more secular northern countries, where the movement is from God and religion to ethnicity. The pressure of antisemitism is influencing change.
An important factor that contributes to increasing antisemitism is the widespread movement of the population and culture, from the Muslim world into Europe, which raises the question Is there a future for Jews in Europe, or does apathy lead to increasing assimilation and self destruction?
Last word: Despite multiple conferences and discussions of how to combat that evil, antisemitism never disappears, it just mutates.■
Walter Bingham, now in his 102nd year of life, holds the Guinness World Records as the world’s oldest working journalist and oldest active radio host.