Different Antisemitisms: On Three Distinct Forms of Antisemitism in C | Page 14

the Holocaust; others came a little later from communist-dominated Eastern and Central
European countries. To many in both of these groups, being accepted and being given living
opportunities in the well-developed Swedish welfare state became somewhat like having
landed in the Promised Land. Many of them did well in Sweden and approved of identifying
as Swedes.
In Hungary the relation is reversed: there, almost all the Jews, 95% of them, were born
in the country, but only a little over 70% feel they belong to the country. Latvia is also a
special case – while over 70% of the Jews there were born in the country, only 40% of them
feel they belong to contemporary Latvia.
If people do not feel they belong to their country of residence, it may depend on their
being in some sense regarded as “strangers” by the other inhabitants of the country. By
combining three measures, viz. the extent to which people in the country hold the opinion that
“Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the country they live in”, that “The interests of the Jews
are very different from the interests in the rest of the population” and that “Jews are not
capable of integration into the country” we may achieve a picture of the degree to which Jews
are perceived as strangers in the country they live in. The picture looks like in Figure 14:

We note that Hungary and Sweden are radical opposites in this respect. On all of the three
measures we have included as indicators of “strangeness” – whether Jews are seen as capable
of integration into the country, whether they are regarded as having different interests than the
general population of the country, and whether they are more loyal to Israel than to the
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