Anti-antisemitism in Germany is the German state's institutionalised opposition to antisemitism, in acknowledgement of the murder of some six million Jews by the Nazi regime in the Holocaust. Anti-antisemitism has been described as "a defining marker of post-war German identity" and a commitment to supporting Israel is considered a Staatsräson, a fundamental principle guiding the German state's actions, a doctrine articulated by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2008. Following the 2015 European migrant crisis, the German federal government and most of Germany's states set up commissioners for fighting antisemitism.
Many of those arrested and cancelled in Germany over allegations of antisemitism have been Jews critical of Israel's policies.
Background and history
According to Aleida Assmann, "the empirical history of evolving memory politics in postwar Germany and in recent times" is the key context for the emergence of institutionalised anti-antisemitism in the 21st century.
In the decades after the war, Holocaust memory was largely confined to the survivors and their communities, a period described by Assmann as "the time when forgetting was prescribed ... by the postwar society and [German Chancellor] Adenauer’s Schlussstrich policy (drawing a line under the past). In the 1980s, this period was disrupted by the Bitburg controversy, sparked by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's joint visit to a cemetery that also included graves of Waffen-SS conscripts, and the Historikerstreit ("historians' dispute"). The latter was a dispute in the late 1980s in West Germany between conservative and left-of-center academics and other intellectuals about how to incorporate Nazi Germany and the Holocaust into German historiography, and more generally into German people's view of themselves – a key focus of debate being the extent to which the methods and ideologies that led to Auschwitz were not unique to Nazi Germany but had roots in earlier historical events, in particular the Stalinist Gulag system.Kattago, Siobhan. Ambiguous Memory: The Nazi Past and German National Identity, Westport: Praeger, 2001, pp. 56–61.
In the wake of the Historikerstreit, the popularity of Holocaust memory peaked in the 1990s after the fall of Communism, and became central to Western historical consciousness as a symbol of the ultimate human evil. Genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses asserted that "the Holocaust has gradually supplanted genocide as modernity's icon of evil"; renowned German historian Wolfgang Benz described it as the "singularly most monstrous crime committed in the history of mankind". Holocaust education, designed to promote citizenship while reducing prejudice generally, became widespread at the same time.
According to Wolfgang Streeck, by the mid-nineties and especially the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, it became clear that the Oslo Accords were doomed to fail and that Israel saw military superiority, colonization and annexation of the occupied territories along with apartheid-like domestic repression as a more promising path than a negotiated peace settlement leading to a two-state solution. Streeck argues that international criticism of Israel, especially from the Global South, placed increasing pressure on Germany, from Israel and the United States, to intensify its support of Israel as mandated by its Staatsräson, and the German government revised its reading of the lessons of the Third Reich – originally understood to lie in supporting both international law and the Jewish state of Israel – to emphasize the latter at the expense of the former. According to Donatella della Porta and Leandros Fischer, the anti-German movement – a leftist splinter group known for flying the Israeli flag and wearing IDF shirts that originally arose as a response to German reunification – played a particular role in shifting the entire German left's discourse on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict to the right.
Israeli-American Holocaust historian Omer Bartov states that Germany has developed its own interpretation of the lessons of the Holocaust, which is strongly influenced by its historical responsibility: that Germany must protect Israel under all circumstances. Therefore, Bartov says that any criticism of Israel is treated with great caution in Germany to avoid being considered antisemitic, a view that has deeply influenced German foreign policy and leads to the fact that Germany often unilaterally sides with Israel, even when international law is violated. With the sole exception of the Linke party, the Staatsräson ideology came to be supported by all political parties represented in the German parliament, including the far-right Alternative für Deutschland.
According to Australian historian A. Dirk Moses, German anti-antisemitism has involved the infusion of new tropes into German public discourse, with a focus on "post-colonial antisemitism", "Israel-related antisemitism" and "hatred of Israel", creating a link between antisemitism—hatred of Jews—and anti-Zionism. It is used, he says, to imply that solidarity with Palestinians, which is particularly widespread in the global south, is due to hatred of Jews rather than the expression of a legitimate political view of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the aim of this being to prevent postcolonial academics as well as the German art and museum scenes from fostering the spread of such views.
Major public debates followed the invitation—and subsequent disinvitation due to political pressure from Antisemitism Commissioner Klein—of postcolonial Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe to the 2020 Ruhrtriennale festival. The Catechism debate, also known as Historikerstreit 2.0, was initiated by A. Dirk Moses with his 2021 essay "The German Catechism", continuing around the invitation of a Palestinian art collective to the Documenta fifteen art exhibition in 2022.
Creation of antisemitism commissioners In the late 2010s and early 2020s, following the 2015 European migrant crisis, German institutions created full-time or part-time positions for fighting antisemitism. The German Parliament decided to establish the office of "Commissioner of the Government for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Anti-Semitism" in January 2018; in addition, 15 of the 16 federal states (Bundesländer) had appointed their own antisemitism commissioners by 2024, with five of these states having additional commissioners in their chief public prosecutors' offices. As of 2024, the commissioners are – with the exception of one who converted to Judaism after his appointment – non-Jews who work in concert with German Jewish organizations.
(Chemnitz University of Technology) has described the creation of the commissioners as a key moment in the development of what she calls "institutionalized anti-anti-Semitism". The Jerusalem Post has called Germany's Federal Commissioner for Jewish Life and the Fight against Antisemitism, Felix Klein, appointed to the role in 2018, "Germany's anti-antisemitism strategist", noting his receipt of the Conference of European Rabbis's Moshe Rosen Prize in 2024, because he "played a leading role in developing a comprehensive strategy to combat antisemitism in Germany, giving special attention to Jewish life in politics and society during difficult times and raising awareness of Jewish life in Germany."
Peter Kuras, writing in Jewish Currents, says that Klein describes the context for the creation of these positions as the large influx of immigrants and refugees from the Middle East, thought to harbour anti-Jewish sentiments. Kuras says that the antisemitism commissioners frequently speak of an increase in what some have called "imported" antisemitism. While only a small fraction of antisemitic incidents (1 percent in 2021) are classified as Islamic, and there is no apparent correlation between immigration and violent antisemitic attacks (committed almost entirely by far-right ethnic Germans), the vast majority of the discourse revolves around racialized minority groups and those intellectuals who stand in solidarity with them, according to Irit Dekel (Indiana University Bloomington) and Esra Öyzürek (University of Cambridge). Judith Gruber (KU Leuven) writes that the belief that Germany has successfully confronted The Holocaust enables the projection of antisemitism onto the outside world, especially to Muslim immigrants—a subtle form of Islamophobia that coexists with the vehement rejection of antisemitism.
Although hate-motivated violence against asylum seekers, Muslim Germans, and refugee aid workers occurs much more frequently, no equivalent institution was created on behalf of Muslim victims of hate crimes. The antisemitism commissioners were controversial from their outset and continuously over the first five years of their operation.
Areas of contention
Particular points in the German debate include the controversial characterization as antisemitism, and consequent rejection, of the following: the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, the accusation that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians, and the depiction of Israel as a colonial or settler-colonial entity.
In 2019, the Bundestag passed a resolution declaring Germany's "unique historical responsibility", which entailed prioritizing "the fight against antisemitism and a commitment to Israel's security" as part of Germany's Staatsräson. The resolution also declared the BDS movement antisemitic and compared it to the 1933 Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses. This comparison—and belief that BDS is "nothing less than the start of a road to another Holocaust"—is used by most BDS opponents. This comparison has been described as "highly questionable, if not pure demagogy" by peace researcher Gert Krell, who argues there is a significant difference between objecting to a military occupation and targeting a powerless minority in a totalitarian state.
In its 2023 Constitutional Protection Report, the Federal Ministry of Interior and Home Affairs said that it was investigating "BDS" as a "suspected extremist organization" Although the ability to block BDS is limited by protections on freedom of expression, the anti-BDS efforts have had a significant effect.
The position of antisemitism commissioner Klein and other German antisemitism monitors has been that the apartheid allegation represents a "demonization of the Jewish State of Israel"; therefore, slogans and stickers such as "no pride in apartheid" have been registered as antisemitic incidents.
2024 antisemitism resolution
In November 2024, an antisemitism resolution proposed by the German mainstream parties "to protect Jewish life" passed with a great cross-party majority in the German parliament, with only the newly formed Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance voting against. The resolution ties public arts and science funding in Germany to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which critics say conflates criticism of Israel with Jew hatred. The resolution was praised by the Israeli government and the state-funded Central Council of Jews in Germany, but Jewish artists and academics in Germany came out strongly against it, with some warning that it identified Jewishness with the policies of the state of Israel and might lead to the "surreal" situation where Jewish and Israeli human rights groups are deemed antisemitic by the German state. In May 2025, 55 mainly Jewish Holocaust researchers, historians and academics supported the Linke party's adoption of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, an alternative formulation to the IHRA definition, designed to allow greater scope for criticism of Israeli government policy.
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