A crisis of anti-Semitism – has enveloped Britain’s Labour Party and poses a serious threat to Jeremy Corbyn’s hopes of ever moving into 10 Downing Street. It is also a resurgent problem in other European countries, such as France, where Jewish cemeteries have been vandalized, businesses daubed with graffiti, and people assaulted in the streets. In the USA, worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh were gunned down in October 2018. Jews throughout Europe and the USA are reporting a growing sense of unease and anxiety about the emergence of what many commentators have described as “the New Anti-Semitism”.

But what exactly is new about today’s form of an ancient hatred? Associated in the past with right-wing extremism, anti-Semitism today is equally likely to come from the left as well as from within some branches of Islam – and even from Muslim members of western legislatures, such as the US Congress. Anti-Semitism is still directed at individual Jews and Jewish communities; but increasingly it is also directed at the existence of the state of Israel itself.