Article by Jacques Ehrenfreund

Introduction: The massacre of October 7, 2023, caused an earthquake whose shockwaves continue to reverberate throughout the Jewish world. In Israel, it reactivated the specter of pogroms, which the state was supposed to have made impossible; in the diaspora, it revealed the fragility of a security that was thought to be guaranteed. In this lecture given in Bern on October 9, historian Jacques Ehrenfreund examines what this event says about our times: the end of the post-Shoah era, the dissolution of European moral standards, and the persistence of a hostility that history seemed to have disqualified.

Why have historians been unable to qualify the October 7 massacres as part of the history of anti-Semitism? Jacques Ehrenfreund analyzes this crisis in the profession as a symptom, highlighting its connection with a form of radical criticism of the Jews on the rise in the West. This criticism, which blames the Jews for having failed to learn the right lessons from history, and in particular from their persecution, has less to do with modern anti-Semitism than with Christian anti-Judaism…

Interview with Sergio Della Pergola, who has published an extensive demographic study on Europe’s Jews. Europe was for centuries home to the world’s largest Jewish population center, and the community’s presence on the Vieux Continent dates to Antiquity. Around 1880, they represented 90% of the world’s Jews. Today they represent only 9%.