Jews, Muslims, and European Tropes of Hatred: Reflections from the UK

• In Event: Politics of Hate? Crafting European Belonging through anti-Jewish Hatreds Old and New

Abstract

Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Muslim research participants in the UK, the paper will contribute to the panel by exploring the way the history and tropes of anti-Jewish hatred are thematised by British Muslims. The paper stems from a broader project, which examined the way members of British Muslim and Jewish communities conceptualised Jewish-Muslim relations in the UK. In conversations with our Muslim interlocutors the topic of anti-Jewish hatred was indexed in two separate but co-constitutive ways. Firstly, our Muslims respondents often referred to the Holocaust and the wider history of European anti-Jewish hatred when talking about their own experiences of discrimination and marginalization in the UK. Secondly, they expressed concern about engaging with Jewish organizations, individuals or spaces for fear of being presumed as anti-Semitic and/or being perceived as expressing anti-Jewish sentiments masked as anti-Israeli critique. Building upon the work of scholars who have explored Jewish-Muslims relations in the broader context of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslims prejudice in Europe (Paul Silverstein, Maud Mandel, Ethan Katz), I will discuss how British Muslim engagement with the topic of anti-Jewish hatred opens new avenues for research which highlights the definitional porousness of concepts such as anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

Author

• Yulia Egorova, Durham University