Can Germany protect its Jews and welcome Muslim migrants?

The nation’s recent intake of migrants from places where anti-Semitism is ubiquitous has produced a scary tension—and one that’s not easy to resolve.

For understandable reasons, Europeans are much more comfortable condemning the familiar anti-Semitism of the far right than the sort expressed by migrants entering Europe as the victims of war and economic deprivation. Nowhere is this issue more fraught than in Germany. …

For the plain fact is that most of the migrants who have come (and continue to come) to Europe hail from Muslim-majority countries that long ago expelled their once-vibrant Jewish populations, where anti-Semitism figures prominently in state propaganda, and where belief in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories is widespread. To take just one obvious incongruity between Germany and the migrants it is accepting: Holocaust denial, a crime punishable by prison in Germany, is pervasive across the Muslim and Arab Middle East. Of course, it would be wrong to presume that every Syrian refugee holds the anti-Semitic attitudes of the country’s former defense minister, who published a book repeating the ancient blood libel about Jews killing gentile children to bake matzos for Passover. But it is equally misguided to deny that many have been profoundly influenced by the anti-Semitic environments in which they were raised. …

One such faction that can directly credit its success to the migrant influx is the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD). Founded by a group of anti-euro economists in 2013, the party did not earn enough votes to clear the parliamentary threshold when it ran in that year’s Bundestag election. A mere four years later, however, having transformed into an ethnic-based party with all the illiberal baggage such a designation entails, it tripled its vote-share and became the first far-right party to enter the Bundestag in some six decades. …

All this was foreseen by German intelligence agencies as a consequence of the migrant influx. “We are producing extremists through immigration,” a German intelligence officer told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper in 2015. “Mainstream civil society is radicalizing because the majority don’t want migration and they are being forced by the political elite.”