The IHRA definition of antisemitism is a "non-legally binding working" definition of antisemitism that was adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in 2016. It is also known as the IHRA working definition of antisemitism (IHRA-WDA). Accompanying the working definition are 11 illustrative examples, seven of which relate to criticism of Israel, that the IHRA describes as guiding its work on antisemitism.
The definition was first published in 2005 by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), a European Union agency, and was known as the EUMC definition or EUMC working definition, and was developed during 2003–2004, and was published without formal review by the EUMC on 28 January 2005.See:
Great Britain. Department for Communities and Local Government. All-party inquiry into antisemitism: government response, The Stationery Office, 2007, p. 3. The EUMC's successor agency, the Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA), removed the working definition from its website in "a clear-out of non-official documents" in November 2013. On 26 May 2016, the working definition was adopted by the IHRA Plenary (consisting of representatives from 31 countries) in Bucharest, Romania, and was republished on the IHRA website. It was subsequently adopted by the European Parliament and other national and international bodies, although not all have explicitly included the illustrative examples. Pro-Israel organizations have been advocates for the worldwide legal adoption of the IHRA working definition.
The definition has been criticised by academics, including legal scholars, for equating antisemitism with the criticism of Israeli actions and policies. The examples relating to Israel have been criticised by academics, including legal scholars, for being open to weaponization of antisemitism used to stifle free speech relating to criticism of Israeli actions and policies. High-profile controversies took place in the United Kingdom in 2011 within the University and College Union, and within the Labour Party in 2018. Critics say weaknesses in the working definition may lend themselves to abuse, that it may obstruct campaigning for the rights of Palestinians (as in the Palestine exception), and that it is too vague. Kenneth S. Stern, who contributed to the original draft, has opposed the weaponization of the definition on college campuses in ways that might undermine free speech. The controversy over the definition led to the creation of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and the Nexus Document, both of which expressly draw distinctions between antisemitism and criticism of Israel.
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Definition The working definition reads:
The text then continues by noting that Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic. Antisemitism frequently charges Jews with conspiring to harm humanity, and it is often used to blame Jews for “why things go wrong.” It is expressed in speech, writing, visual forms and action, and employs sinister stereotypes and negative character traits.
After giving illustrative examples, the document also defines when antisemitic acts consitute hate crimes and when criminal acts should be considered antisemitic, and also defines antisemitic discrimination.
Examples The definition was published with a list of "Contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere", noting that it was not an exhastive list and that to count as examples would require "taking into account the overall context". Among these were threats of harm, stereotypes and conspiracy theories, attributing collective responsibility to all Jews for any wrongdoing committed by Jews or by Israel, Holocaust denial, charges of dual loyalty, denial of self-determination and double standards.
Seven of the eleven examples mention Israel:Brownlee, Jason. "Efforts to Weaponize Title VI against Pro-Palestine Speech on University Campuses." Texas Journal on Civil Liberties & Civil Rights, vol. 30, no. 1, Fall 2024, pp. 52-88. HeinOnline.
The European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) and the drafting of the definition The Commission on Racism and Xenophobia (CRX) was established in 1994 to monitor different forms of racism and xenophobia. In 1998, it became the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), following Council Regulation (EC) No 1035/97 of 2 June 1997. In 2002, it published a large-scale monitoring report on Islamophobia since 9/11, including a total of 75 reports, 15 from each member state, and a synthesis report.
In 2003, EUMC commissioned a report on antisemitism. The context for this was a rise in antisemitic incidents in the period of the Second Intifada of 2001-2, and calls for European authorities to address this (including the influential interventions by Canadian human rights scholar and parliamentarian Irwin Cotler), as well as the identification by Swedish politician Per Ahlmark and others of the concept of the "collective Jew" as part of a "new antisemitism"; this all led to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) organizing its first conference on antisemitism in 2003, as well as the EUMC study.
The commissioned report, written by the Centre for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA) in Berlin, was suppressed by the EUMC, which then wrote its own report. In December 2003, the ZfA analyzed a pre-release version of the EUMC report, which was leaked to the press and, according to civil rights lawyers Kenneth L. Marcus and Kenneth S. Stern, was badly received. The report initially said the primary cause of rising antisemitism in Europe was young Muslim males, while a press release for the subsequent final publication attributed the rise to "young, disaffected white Europeans", although the final report itself was more nuanced.
The EUMC report was entitled Manifestations of antisemitism in the EU 2002–2003, and was published in May 2004 incorporating a second report on perceptions of antisemitism based on interviews with European Jews. The antisemitism report was based on data collected by the 15 contact points of EUMC's monitoring network, RAXEN, and evaluated by Alexander Pollak, an independent researcher.
The report noted that in compiling the report, only nine of its 15 contact points used an explicit definition of antisemitism, and that those nine were all different, and that this generated problems of comparability in the data. It therefore included a section (written by Pollak and Alexander Joskovicz) on definitions. This cited Brian Klug's argument that antisemitism "is best defined not by an attitude towards Jews but by a definition of 'Jew'" and who regards antisemitism as "the process of turning Jews into 'Jews'", and concluded by proposing this definition in order to collect and compare incidents across countries: The report explored the question of when anti-Zionist or anti-Israel expression might be antisemitic, Marcus describes this as a "figural definition". It was based on "seven stereotypical traits: deceptiveness, strange-ness, hostility, greed, corruption, conspiratorial power, and deicidal murderousness". The EUMC report concluded that anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist expression could only be considered antisemitic if it was based on the stereotype of Israel as the collective Jew, leading Marcus to conclude that "it generated a standard under which most forms of anti-Israel animus would appear to be excluded, even if they resulted in violence against individual non-Israeli Jews", as in a Montreal school firebombing that occurred days after the report was released.
Following the EUMC report, the OSCE's Berlin Declaration, made at the organization's second conference on the topic, recognised that post-World War II antisemitism had taken on "new forms and manifestations" and was now at times directed against Jews as a collective body; Marcus comments that "certain forms of hostility toward Israel have targeted Israel as a collective Jew." The Berlin Declaration also tasked the OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) to work with the EUMC to develop better ways to monitor antisemitic incidents in OSCE countries. According to Marcus, the EUMC scrapped this failed definition of antisemitism, largely due to pressure from American Jewish organizations.
2004-5 drafting and publication According to Kenneth S. Stern of the AJC, a human rights lawyer, Israeli scholar Dina Porat, then head of the Stephen Roth Institute at Tel Aviv University, proposed the idea for a common definition of antisemitism during an NGO conference organized by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in April 2004. Stern was critical of the EUMC's original definition, as it was confusing about when attacks on Jews related to the Israel–Palestine conflict could be considered antisemitic, and required investigators to know the intentions of attackers. Meanwhile, the EUMC asked Jewish NGOs and academics to provide "a simple working definition that would encompass antisemitic demonization of Israel, and which could also be used by their own RAXEN network of national focal points and by law enforcement agencies". According to the AJC's Andrew Baker and Deidre Berger and the Community Security Trust's Michael Whine,
During 2003–04, a large group of experts and organisations coordinated by Stern—together with Dina Porat; Holocaust scholars Yehuda Bauer, Michael Berenbaum and Roni Stauber; Baker, Berger and Whine; human rights expert Felice D. Gaer; and others—drafted a proposed definition and set of examples.See:
Dina Porat, , in Anti-Semitism Worldwide 2003/4, Tel Aviv University, 2005, pp. 5–17 According to Baker, Berger and Whine, "Ken [Stern] played the vitally important but limited role of being the communications hub as various drafts and proposed language were circulated, slowly moving toward a consensus agreement where his role ended. All agreed the definition should include both a core paragraph defining the basic nature of antisemitism and clear examples of its traditional and more contemporary forms." The 2004 draft working definition said:
This was then followed by a list of illustrative examples, including five examples of the ways in which antisemitism manifests itself with regard to Israel. According to both Marcus and Antony Lerman, the novel element in this draft definition was identifying certain criticism of Israel and Zionism as antisemitic. Marcus also highlights the "praxeological" nature of the definition and its examples—i.e. its focus on pragmatic identification rather than scholarly understanding.