The New Face of Antisemitism in Europe

A routine cab ride turns into a chilling reminder that antisemitism in Europe is adapting, migrating, and speaking openly.

photo: Lala Azizli/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Jonny Gould, a TV and radio broadcaster and journalist.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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With my family on holiday in Barcelona, we hailed a cab for what should have been a routine trip across the city centre.

At first, the driver answered vaguely to my questions about the sites we were passing. Cabbies know their cities, right?

But it quickly became clear that he knew very little about the places he drives around daily. He seemed almost content in that ignorance, brushing it off with the explanation that he was “not from here.” He was from, as he put it, “a beautiful country called Morocco.”

My wife, sitting in the back with our young kids, was born in Morocco.

Then, without warning, he turned to her and asked with sharpness: “Are you Jewish?”

Like many in the Moroccan Jewish diaspora, she feels an instinctive familiarity when meeting fellow Moroccans abroad. That instinct lowered her guard. “Yes,” she answered perhaps injudiciously.

What came back from Taxi Driver was swift and chilling. “The Jews are our eternal enemy,” he snapped.

There was no hesitation, no embarrassment, no sense that he was crossing any line. He then belligerently quoted the Koran at us, invoking what he claimed were sacred words that instructed his seeming hatred. I replied that our Torah certainly does not teach that Jews and Muslims are eternal enemies.

In any event, the Torah predates Islam by two millennia. There was no rival religion to correspond with. My message of conciliation did nothing to soften him. If anything, my calmness seemed only to irritate him further.

He grew more animated, offering us his diagnosis of the world. He said he had been forced to live in Spain because of the decline of Morocco, blaming prostitution and alcohol for corrupting and impoverishing his country. My wife pointed out that there was hardly less of that in Spain. He conceded the point, but said life was better here because in Europe “we are free.”

Free, he said, to do whatever one wants. Free to criticise the Moroccan kings in ways impossible back home, free to speak openly. That, in his reasoning, was why there were now millions of Muslims in Europe.

My wife reminded him that many Moroccans still feel deep loyalty to their monarchy. On this, too, he erupted. He declared his hatred for his kings, blaming them squarely for Morocco’s uptick in poverty, prostitution, national decline — and, inevitably, their “Zionism.” He then told us without a blink of irony that Muslims “do not kill.” Sitting inside our yellow and black cage, my wife thought better than to point to the mountain of evidence to the contrary.

In his generosity, he explained why he wouldn’t kill us. For that, he proclaimed us as “dhimmi.” It’s a term for non-Muslims, mostly Christians, Jews, and other People of the Book living under Islamic rule. What’s left of non-Muslims in Islam-majority countries are, in theory, granted safety for their lives and property, and freedom to practice their faith, in exchange for paying a special tax called jizya and accepting a subject status.

Then he reached further back, to 1492, as though history itself were a ledger in which Jews were permanently in debt. He said that Moroccan Jews were ungrateful, that Morocco had welcomed Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition and had been repaid with betrayal. He claimed Jews were still streaming to Morocco. My wife corrected him: The Jewish community throughout Morocco has shrunk to little more than a thousand souls.

As across much of the Muslim-majority world, an ancient Jewish presence has been reduced to near-extinction.

What struck me most was not simply his antisemitism, but its confidence. This was not the embarrassed prejudice of someone testing boundaries; it was a total worldview, spoken openly, in a European city, to Jewish passengers trapped in his cab.

I have never been especially quick to anger when confronted by Islamists or by the various Western ideologues who excuse or sanitise them. Jews have outlived empires, inquisitors, pogromists, and fanatics. We will surely outlive this lot too.

Perhaps it was that lack of fear, that refusal to rise to his bait, that made him angrier. Perhaps more than that, there’s a gap between what’s in his heart and what he says which prompts this bitterness and self-hate.

As the journey neared its end, I asked him what he thought of Israel. His answer completed the picture. “They have stolen Palestinian land,” he said, “and they should not exist.”

I told him, plainly, that it is precisely his worldview that makes Israel necessary and strong. In this day and age, Jewish self-determination means he can’t humiliate us at will with his crass words and amoral ire.

I travelled to Morocco for the first time last year, and what I saw there only partially reflected the country of my wife’s childhood. Among many older Moroccans — Arab and Berber alike — there remains a sense of kinship with Jews, even as the community itself fades year by year. But this Barcelona taxi driver represented something else: a hardened ideological hatred that has not disappeared in migration, but in many cases has travelled intact into and across Europe.

And that is the point too many people refuse to confront. Worse still, they enable it through what they term “tolerance” and multiculturalism.

Because men like this can settle in a European country, work full-time, pay taxes, raise a family, accumulate no criminal record — and still carry inside him a murderous worldview. Respectability, employment, and routine civic participation do not, by themselves, neutralise extremism. The capacity for violence can coexist quite comfortably with the appearance of normality.

I point to Bastille Day 2016, in Nice, when 31-year-old Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel drove a 19-ton cargo truck down the Promenade des Anglais, killing 86 and injuring hundreds more. He was not on intelligence watch lists, although he had a small criminal record for minor violence and theft.

Sitting in that cab, I was acutely aware of our vulnerability. He could have done anything — locked the doors, taken us hostage, driven into a crowd, turned on us physically, or simply decided that the people in his back seat were enemies rather than passengers.

At the end of the journey, I paid the fare. I said in Arabic, “As-salamu alaykum” (And upon you be peace, and the mercy of Allah, and His blessings). He replied, “Wa alaykum as-salam” (And upon you be peace). Then I answered, “Shalom aleichem.” He would not acknowledge the Hebrew. He repeated the Arabic again, adding a patronising “habibi,” as if even the shared linguistic heritage of our greetings had to be denied in Jewish tongue — that we should not exist at all.

It was a journey of no more than 12 minutes, but it was a revealing one. Not just rejection, but refusal: refusal of reciprocity, refusal of kinship, refusal even of recognition. And that, in miniature, is one of Europe’s deeper problems.

Open societies assume a level of mutual commitment: that those who enjoy liberty will, at the very least, refrain from using it to attack the freedoms and minorities around them. But any weakness in a democratic society can be exploited by those who do not share its values. When political and cultural elites dismiss this reality — or excuse it out of cowardice, fashion, or ideological confusion — they are not defending tolerance; they are feeding the forces that will one day turn on them too.

What happened in that Barcelona taxi was not just an ugly conversation. It was yet another crystal clear warning.

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