Europe's Jewish Problem.(International Edition; POINT OF VIEW)

In Spain, unfavorable views of Jews climbed from 21 percent in 2005 to nearly one in two this year.

As Europe faces up to its old demons of financial breakdown and job losses, a wind from the past is blowing through the continent. The politics of moderate center-right and left-liberal democracy that took power after 1945 are giving way to a new old populism. The extravagant rhetoric of the demagogic left and right is gaining ground, and the most obvious manifestation is the return of anti-Semitism as an organizing ideology.

Consider the numbers: according to a recent Pew survey, the percentage of Germans who hold unfavorable views of Jews has climbed from 20 percent in 2004 to 25 percent today. In France, which has the largest number of Jews of any European nation, 20 percent of people view Jews unfavorably--up from 11 percent four years ago. In Spain, the figures are even more striking: negative views of Jews climbed from 21 percent in 2005 to nearly one in two this year. In Britain, where the numbers have remained around 9 percent for some time, anecdotal evidence of increased animosity abounds: youngsters returning from the Jewish Free School in middle-class North London are now frightened to go home on public buses on account of anti-Jewish attacks. Their parents hire private buses, as the London police seem unable to staunch anti-Semitic assaults on their children. In Manchester, a Jewish cemetery had to have a Nazi swastika hurriedly cleaned off its walls before a VIP party arrived.

Anti-Semitism also lies at the heart of the ideology of the British National Party, the fastest-growing political party in Britain. Already, the extreme rightist party has won a seat on the London Assembly, and in local elections this year the BNP doubled its number of local councilors. The party now avoids public statements about Jews and even tries to keep its Islamophobia under control. Yet the only serious publications by BNP leader Nick Griffin are in the mainstream of traditional anti-Semitic tropes. In his short book "Who are the Mindbenders?" Griffin listed British Jews who he said were the secret controllers of the British media, accused Jewish immigrants of changing their names to disguise their origins and called the facts of the Holocaust gas chambers "unscientific nonsense."

Alongside the Jew-hating BNP are Britain's anti-Semitic Islamist ideologues. Gordon Brown--Europe's strongest supporter of Israel--and his Labour government have done more than any other to promote British Muslims as government ministers, as M.P.s and peers, and Downing Street celebrates Muslim festivals and achievements in a manner that would amaze previous occupants of the building. ...