Documenting Contemporary Antisemitism is a research blog for CHACE (Comparing Histories of Antisemitism in Contemporary Europe), a project based at the Norwegian Institute for Social Research and the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX) at the University of Oslo.

This site will be used as an archive to post project updates, links to publications, data, and documentation.1

About CHACE

This project investigates the development of antisemitism in post-Cold War Europe, charting its trajectories and explaining temporal and geographical variation in its prevalence and intensity. The project asks two key questions:

  • What characterizes the diverging paths of post-Cold War antisemitism in Europe?
  • Why has antisemitism come to afflict some countries more than others, as demonstrated by the varying degrees of anti-Jewish attitudes, the variations in number and intensity of antisemitic attacks, and differences in the levels of concern expressed by Jews?

Seventy-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, antisemitism persists. Many Jews in Europe worry about their future on the continent. According to a 2018 EU survey, an average 38% of Jewish respondents had considered emigrating because of safety concerns—up from 29% in the previous (2012) survey. In cities such as Paris, Berlin, and Copenhagen many Jews conceal their identity in public. Terrorists have targeted Jewish people and places in Toulouse, Paris, Brussels, Copenhagen, and Halle, revealing the tip of a larger iceberg of antisemitic attacks in the past twenty years. Following the Hamas-led attack and massacre in southern Israel on 7 October 2023 and the ensuing war, these trends were exacerbated further.

Antisemitism is not afflicting all European countries equally, however, nor is it being expressed or experienced the same way in all places. To understand variation in contemporary antisemitism, it is necessary to trace its development over time and across countries, and to analyze how this hostility affects Jews. The lack of comparative-historical studies is a particularly notable shortcoming in current research. To fill this and other gaps, CHACE employs a broad-ranging approach combining comparative-longitudinal case studies, quantitative analysis of survey data, and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to account for the diverging paths and impacts of post-Cold War antisemitism in Europe.

CHACE was funded by the Research Council of Norway. Directing the project, and maintaining this site, is Johannes Due Enstad, Senior Researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Social Research. Also participating in the project is Alec Z. Roslonska, a doctoral research fellow at C-REX.

  1. Thanks to The Programming Historian, and especially Amanda Visconti’s great primer on how to build a static website with Jekyll and GitHub Pages, for inspiring the creation of this site. ↩