Holocaust Memorial Day: antisemitism and ‘The Plague’ 

“It’s unthinkable. Everyone knows that it has vanished from the western World.” Like Europe in the 1930s, the pre-2020 world, and yes, the population of Oran in Camus’ C, all seemed to look at the threat that was advancing towards them with a sense of disbelief. It is exactly for that reason that Camus thought a plague to be the adequate allegory for the horror that had been Nazism: no one saw it coming, no one could adequately understand it, and most importantly, no one sees it coming back.

Up until 2020 The Plague felt like an elaborate and skilful allegory of France under Nazi occupation; the pandemic then turned it into an all-too-accurate prophecy. Today, it reads like a warning: a reminder that, like the population of Oran in Camus’ novel, it is the belief that a plague is “impossible” that makes us most vulnerable to it. Most of us had thought our world cleared of the evil of antisemitism — a world in which, as the concièrge says upon hearing of the first dead rat in the building, “there are no rats”. I say most of us because, for those at the receiving end of this hatred, it has never ceased to be an everyday reality.

What we have seen in recent months, triggered by the events in the Middle East, is not a rise in antisemitism but its reappearance. Antisemitic acts of violence and antisemitic rhetoric have indeed risen, but the antisemitism itself had never disappeared. Like the disease, it has emerged, “thrusting up to the surface the abscesses and pus-clots that had been forming” beneath the surface of our everyday lives.

How else can one explain the celebratory distribution of sweets in the streets of Berlin, minutes after news of the 7th of October massacres hit the world, a thousand-percent rise in antisemitic hate crimes in London, and Jewish graveyards being vandalised throughout the world? This is not just criticism of Israel’s actions; these are demonstrations of hatred against Jewish people, which have only been exacerbated by the current war. Not recognising that antisemitism had always been there and attributing it to recent events marks the beginning of our moral failure.

Yet those violent actions do not happen in a vacuum; they happen in a context in which the promise “Never Again” (nie wieder) has been endlessly repeated, especially in Germany, but perhaps not understood. Surely, one cannot at once understand what these two words entail and claim that calling for the genocide of Jews only constitutes a form of harassment “depending on the context” in which the call is made; yet this is a claim that not one, but three leaders of top American universities have made. If the heads of the best universities don’t seem to understand why calling for the genocide of any people, but particularly the Jewish people, is unquestionably problematic, it is with worry but sadly without surprise that I have read the recent polls that suggest one in five young Americans think the Holocaust is a myth. Perhaps like those celebrating the end of the plague, it is easier to deny that “we had ever known a crazy world in which men were killed off like flies, or that precise savagery, that calculated frenzy of the plague…”

In the United Kingdom, the Labour Party has just recently come out of a decade-long epidemic of antisemitism, where its leader somehow veiled his criticism of Israel by associating himself with Holocaust deniers – or whatever senseless defence Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters are still parroting. Despite this, he remains popular amongst a significant fraction of young voters who are willing to overlook this – seeing antisemitism as a negligible flaw, or worse, an unfounded accusation.

But this loss of understanding around what the Holocaust represents, the increased sense that it constitutes a mere episode of history, rather than a trauma that some live with, and others have passed down.

This year’s Holocaust Memorial Day takes place in a world where antisemitism is more visible than it has been for some years. So it is important not only to remember the horrors of Nazism and mourn for its victims, but also to remind ourselves that the plague that is antisemitism has not vanished. Unless we acknowledge it in order to resist it, “the plague bacillus never dies…”

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