“We’re alone in this together”: the anthropology of fear and Jewish attitudes to antisemitism

ABSTRACT

Social science literature contains a thread of theory on the experience and function of fear within society. However, despite rising global concerns about antisemitism, Jewish experiences of such fear within a multicultural framework, such as that in Australia, remains largely unexamined on a qualitative basis. Jewish individuals and organizations speak in specific ways about their fears of antisemitism, both inwardly to their communities and outwardly to the public. While experiences and attitudes differ between different countries, this discourse can be interpreted as a performative act which produces, regulates and constrains the identities of Jewish communities, perpetrators and societies in relation to antisemitism. Culture is a factor telling individuals what to fear and how to respond, and fears reflect not only people's firsthand experiences but the collective social norms, values, and moral codes their group wishes to promote. This paper examines Jewish attitudes to antisemitism through the lens of anthropological theories of fear. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with the Jewish community of South East Queensland, Australia, it explores how contemporary antisemitism fears and threats to safety are commonly spoken about within the community and to outsiders, particularly with regards to popular antisemitic stereotyping, “alt-right” activity and radical Islam.

KEYWORDS:

• Antisemitism
• fear
• Jewish communities
• Australia
• social anthropology

Introduction

One of the realities of life as a minority group within a wider society is the negative recognition of difference, manifesting as distrust, prejudice or outright abuse towards the minority. In the Jewish case, such prejudice is known as “antisemitism”, terminology originating in nineteenth-century German racial science which classified Jews as part of a “Semitic” race of people, inferior to German nationals.¹ Taking one of many widely-available definitions, the 2016 definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, antisemitism is “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”² Other definitions specify elements of antisemitism such as stereotyping, hostility, calculated apathy and ignorance of Jewish issues, and Holocaust trivialization, and include Anti-Zionist and anti-Israel sentiment as additional forms of “new antisemitism.”³

With antisemitism comes fear of the physical and emotional damages such sentiments bring to those with a Jewish identity. This fear is a common feature of Jewish life, to varying degrees, across the whole global diaspora, regardless of the diverse characteristics of different host societies. In Australia, even though freedom of religion is enshrined within the state framework both for individuals on a private level and for religious movements on a public level,⁴ antisemitic attitudes and actions still arise, often unpredictably, and religious freedom is still tempered for Jewish institutions (as for their Muslim counterparts⁵) by securitization and fear. Though free expression of cultural difference is supported and promoted by the framework of multiculturalism in Australia, there have been consistent issues around racial and ethnic prejudices,⁶ which are often inflamed into violence and make minority groups fearful.⁷ Thus while antisemitism is the focus of this study, it is only part of a broader issue of race, religion and ethnicity in Australia. The centrality of antisemitism fears to the Jewish identity links to a long-established collective social history and experience, overtaking any history of personal and family experience. This deep, abiding and shared nature of Jewish fear of antisemitism makes it an ideal case study through which to explore anthropological theories of fear as both a process and a product of culture.

Using data from ethnographic fieldwork with the Jewish community of South East Queensland, Australia, this paper examines Jewish attitudes towards antisemitism through the lens of anthropological theories on fear. The narrative on the existence and prevalence of antisemitism, its sources and causes, and the responses and reactions taken to incidents and sentiments are considered within this theoretical framework. Not only are attitudes and approaches towards antisemitism influenced by cultural identity, but these attitudes and approaches are performed to reinforce that cultural identity within the surrounding mainstream social framework, positioning the community, in the words of one local Jewish spokesperson, “alone in this together.”

Fear in anthropological literature

David Scruton coined the term “sociophobics” to encapsulate the study of fear as a social phenomenon. Scruton theorizes that “fear is an event that takes place in a social setting … performed by social animals whose lives and experiences are dominated by culture.”⁸ Thus, fear can be treated as a feature of cultural experience, one which is expressed to the self and to others who receive and react to it. Scruton assesses both physical and social fears and concludes that culture defines not only what situations an individual should be afraid of, but the degree and form to which the individual's fear response should conform.

Fears reflect, amongst other things, collective social institutions, values, moral codes, and even economic criteria of a group. As Andrea Boscoboinik points out, sources of fears do not need to have been directly experienced by the individuals within the group to have potency; fears “are not always based on personal experience, but rather on what we think about risks … mediated through cultural values and social belonging.”⁹ Additionally, it is not merely the experience of fearing, but the discourse around fear, which is selectively perceived by different groups in distinct societies.

Whilst group identity helps group members by providing a culturally appropriate framework for experiencing and expressing fear, the culturally-framed experience of fear also has benefits for group identity and functionality. Fear encourages individuals to “behave properly lest they have cause to fear,”¹⁰ reinforcing group behavioural norms. Joanna Bourke identifies the tendency for fear, at least at a moderate level, to encourage group cohesion: “fear states … are liable to draw people together, either for comfort or to defend themselves more effectively against the danger.”¹¹ Whilst some of these communal benefits happen as natural reactions to fear of danger, groups and their leaders often identifiably practice an “instrumentalisation of fear” through the rhetoric used to discuss concerns within the community and with outside forces.¹²

Inherent in the concept of fear is the balance of power relations between the fearer and the thing feared. Power, according to Michel Foucault, is a force which “categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize.”¹³ In reacting to fear, this power can be contested, and one can take steps to push back against the identity formed for them by the fear source, to effect and enact their own empowered identity which opposes it. Fear's link to power resonates with Judith Butler's ideas of performativity as a negotiation of power; as the performative identity takes and uses power to form, contest and reform the subject, power is used to reinterpret fear so it can then be acted against.¹⁴

Thus, theoretically-speaking, fear can be identified as not only a product of culture, but also a process of cultural reinforcement, and an expression and negotiation of power relations between the fearer and the object of fear. Linda B. Green observes these trends in the lived experience of Mayan minorities in Guatemala, where fear narratives have “served as a shield to provide distance and [have] also been a powerful shaper of Mayan practice.”¹⁵ Likewise, Setha M. Low observes how the culture of the gated urban neighbourhood in the USA not only attracts residents through fear, but retains and reinforces a cultural separation as well as a physical one between residents and non-residents.¹⁶ Similarly, Judith Pettigrew & Kamal Adhikari discuss how fear within Nepalese communities in and around the Maoist insurgency was “negotiated through social relationships” within the community and highly culturally contextual.¹⁷ These processes are also apparent in the examination of Jewish attitudes towards antisemitism, as seen in ethnographic examination of the small South-East Queensland Jewish community. Though examining how Jewish individuals, institutions and communities think, speak and act about antisemitism as part of a lived experience of Australian Jewishness this paper contributes a unique Australian regional perspective to international understandings of antisemitism experiences. Furthermore, by examining how conceptualizing and responding to antisemitism forms part of an active project of multicultural community belonging and religious freedom, this paper brings new voices and interpretations to debates and discussions around fear, power and culture in Jewish studies and in anthropology more broadly.

Materials and methods

Material for this paper draws on a wider ethnographic analysis of the South-East Queensland Jewish community conducted in 2017-2018, with the author immersed within the local community of Jewish individuals to examine their practices and expressions of culture. Conducted by the author as a member of the community, the ethnographic project followed the model of “insider” anthropology.¹⁸ As part of the ethnographic process, 18 official community events were attended and observed. In attendance, the author took the approach of “observant participation”, rather than traditional participant observation, where “ethnographers both experience and observe their own and others’ co-participation within the ethnographic encounter.”¹⁹ The author acted as a community-involved insider participant in all events, and this co-participation directly informs the ethnographic findings.

Additionally, the author conducted interviews with 25 members of the local Jewish community. Interviews followed the model of person-centrred interviewing, where the community members are asked for their own views, experiences and practices of their culture, rather than informing about their perceptions of their group's cultural practice universally. This approach allows for a more meaningful investigation of respondents’ negotiation of their own “social, material and symbolic contexts” as individuals who share a communal identity.²⁰ Participants were selected purposively to represent a broad sample across the spectrum of the community. Amongst other questions informing the wider ethnographic project, participants were asked specifically about their views on antisemitism – its prevalence, sources, previous firsthand experiences, and responses they perceived as most appropriate.

Table

Pseudonym	Gender	Age Group	Birthplace
Alisa	F	55–74	Africa
Dalya	F	35–54	Israel
Devir	M	35–54	Israel
Elli	F	18–34	Australia
Elsie	F	75+	UK
Ezra	M	18–34	USA
Gabe	M	55–74	Africa
Gail	F	55–74	UK
Gal	F	35–54	Israel
Gideon	M	55–74	Africa
Gil	M	55–74	Australia
Jonathan	M	18–34	Australia
Jori	M	18–34	Australia
Joseph	M	55–74	Australia
Matty	M	35–54	UK
Miriam	F	75+	UK
Noam	M	18–34	Australia
Omer	M	55–74	Australia
Raphael	M	35–54	UK
Rena	F	55–74	Africa
Ruth	F	55–74	Australia
Samuel	M	75+	UK
Sol	M	75+	Europe
Susannah	F	18–34	Australia
Tamar	F	18–34	Israel

Narrative analysis was applied to the spoken and enacted discourse of the field notes and interview transcripts. Looking at the narrative performed within the discourse of interviews, community documentation and publicly-observable activity, connections could be drawn between events and ideas being discussed. Moreover, insight could be gained into the culturally-based meaning of those events and ideas to the speakers.²¹

Background: the south-east Queensland Jewish community

Jewish life in Australia has a long-documented history, with the first Jewish inhabitants arriving as convicts from Great Britain on the First Fleet of 1788. Whilst a few Jewish convicts served their time in Queensland's Moreton Bay penal colony between 1825 and 1839, there was no provision for active Jewish life among convicts, and Jewish free settlement in the South-East Queensland area began in earnest only the early 1860s. Communal Jewish life was established with the foundation of the Brisbane Hebrew Congregation on March 19th, 1865, and the city's first synagogue was erected in July 1886. A second congregation, South Brisbane Hebrew Congregation, was established in 1915 by Eastern European Jewish immigrant families. A Jewish congregation was established in 1957 on the Gold Coast, a growing seaside metropolis south of Brisbane, and Liberal congregations were established in both cities in the 1970s. All five congregations are still active to this day, though there is no true “Jewish quarter” or enclave within either city where Jewish homes and businesses come together.²²

The South-East Queensland community makes up 3% of Australia's total reported Jewish population of 91,000, with over 85% of Australia's Jews living in the larger southern state capitals of Sydney and Melbourne. Recent Australian Bureau of Statistics figures state that 2,740 Jewish individuals live in the Brisbane and Gold Coast local government areas, 0.16% of their overall 1.7 million population.²³ Queensland Jewish community officials estimate the number to be closer to 4,000, due to a global trend towards underreporting of Jewish identity in official censuses.²⁴ The community has a diverse mix of origins, with some families tracing their heritage back to the original founder, and others to influxes of European, South African and Israeli migrants in different periods of the community's history. Contemporary global mobility has also seen increasing numbers of Jewish families from across the globe settle in South-East Queensland over the past 25 years. Overseeing the community and its institutions is the community's roof body, the Queensland Jewish Board of Deputies, which represents the community in interactions with the state, the media and other faith and ethnic groups, as well as connecting and encouraging collaboration between different local Jewish community organizations.²⁵

Findings

Existence and prevalence of antisemitism

“There is hatred and you do need to be aware of it … but I don't feel unsafe.” (Gal, 40 yrs, F²⁶)

In February 2018, the Israeli Ministry for the Diaspora published a press release on their new automated antisemitism social media monitoring software, and publicized it with a screenshot showing that Brisbane, Queensland's capital, ranked 6th in the non-Arab, non-Muslim world for antisemitic posts. The Queensland Jewish Board of Deputies released their own accompanying statement, asserting that Brisbane was indeed a “hotbed for antisemitic posts”, with “strong anti-Israel and antisemitic feeling in Queensland from the left and the right” surrounding the small community and its place within the “seemingly tolerant and multicultural state.” Such a high level of antisemitism, according to the Board, “should be of grave concern to all decent Australians who care about their fellow Aussies and wish to continue to live in this tolerant, accepting country of ours.”²⁷

Whatever the Ministry for the Diaspora report might state, the Executive Council for Australian Jewry's findings on Antisemitism in Australia in 2017 paint a somewhat different picture from the “hotbed” claim. In the twelve months to September 2017, the ECAJ reports that of the 230 reported incidences of antisemitic activity nationally, there were twenty in Queensland – fifteen placements of antisemitic posters, stickers and flyers, and five incidences of antisemitic graffiti.²⁸ Even factoring in the report's suggestion that these figures might represent only 25% of total incidences,²⁹ Queensland still reports no incidences of violent or verbal antisemitic abuse. Additionally, almost all the incidences were located in regional centres outside the major centres of Brisbane and the Gold Coast, or were on university campuses with limited audiences.³⁰ The ECAJ report also profiles dozens of active antisemitic Australian online commentators and groups. Where location is identified, they are listed as mostly based in other Australian centres than Queensland. Of the many listed examples of antisemitic commentary posted to Jewish organizational and individual Facebook pages, only two were Queensland-based. Therefore, judging by the ECAJ's findings, Queensland's Jewish community appears to be mostly safe from the sort of antisemitic threatening behaviour experienced by their interstate neighbours.

The lack of antisemitism on paper was not mirrored in the narrative Queensland's Jews told about the antisemitism they faced. For most of the South-East Queensland Jews interviewed, antisemitism was a fact of life. For example, from Raphael: “I’d like to say there isn't antisemitism, but there is … it's almost like a dirty little secret”, and from Gil, “I think there's antisemitism everywhere … it's intrinsic.” However, for most it was troubling, but not something to be afraid of. Some, like Noam, pointed to the largely individual and unorganized nature of most threats as lessening their fear: “not every crazy person represents the wider community that he's part of.” They also pointed to the small scale of incidences; both Raphael and Rena described the antisemitism they observed as merely “little things” and “little ways.” Many also pointed to the relative invisibility of the community within the mainstream social landscape as a buffer against dangerous antisemitism: from Samuel, a member of the community for over seventy years, “The community's never been big enough to attract it. There's always been a bit around, but you don't usually see it.” Others put the antisemitic encounter down to a matter of luck. Thus, Tamar said “I’ve also had close personal friends who’ve managed to encounter really, really nasty people here in Australia … how have I not met people like that yet? It's definitely an element of luck.” Regardless of their reasoning, most individuals did not feel actively threatened by antisemitic sentiment within the wider community, or at least were not threatened enough to act on it. A 2017 community-wide security briefing drew only a dozen participants; an organizer joked glumly that “this is the sum total of seriousness that the Brisbane community takes” with regards to security from antisemitic threats.

The organized communal view of the prevalence of antisemitism echoed much more the rhetoric of the Executive Council for Australian Jewry and Ministry for the Diaspora; that antisemitism was everywhere, that threats were imminent, and that this threatened the fabric not only of the Jewish community but of Queensland's wider society. For example, at a community security briefing, the official community security consultant expressed the view that antisemitic “stuff happens here all the time … [it's] not just a Jewish threat, but a wider threat that poses risks to all even if Jews might be more hated targets.” Official community narratives also referred to antisemitism as “bigots who are out in full force”, “a case of not if but when”, and even “a global tsunami of hate.” There was a significant current of frustration from community leaders about the popular individual attitude towards the threat. “People would rather have their heads in the sand and blame CSG [voluntary Community Security Group] if something happens to them,” one community leader complained.

In light of the discrepancy between recorded statistics and personal observations, it would appear that Australia is similar to the USA, where “most Jews who define antisemitism as a problem do not refer to actual prejudice against Jews but to fear of antisemitism.”³¹ But as Frank Furedi explains, “once the mindset of fear prevails, it creates a world where problems and difficulties are inflated.”³² Thus, anxieties regarding antisemitism can potentially be far greater than the cold statistical data would suggest. Some commentators suggest that the diligent approach to cataloguing and condemning each and every instance of local and global antisemitism actively plays on and creates a sense of “fantasied suffering”³³ born of “centuries of psychological conditioning.”³⁴ As in US-based Jewish communities,³⁵ threats and antisemitic sentiments in other diaspora centres, especially Europe, increase fears of antisemitism in the South-East Queensland community, despite not being replicated locally to the same extent. For example, at a community security briefing, one organizational representative used a terror attack in Europe in order to call for heightened security measures in the South-East Queensland Jewish community.

Within the framework of anthropological theories on fear, performing an identity struggling under the weight of significant antisemitic sentiment has its benefits. By establishing the existence of antisemitism but identifying it as not something to be afraid of, the community effectively disempowers the antisemitic sentiment, because as Bourke states, there is no power in danger without fear.³⁶ Considerable risk of antisemitism can also make the performance of Jewish identity feel more rewarding; in theory, if there is a significant risk to being Jewish, it follows that being Jewish is something rewarding enough for the community to keep doing despite the danger.³⁷ For example, when in an interview Miriam identifies the source of antisemitism as “I think some of it is jealousy … scapegoating”, she reinforces the narrative that Jewishness is rewarding, something which makes non-Jews jealous leading to antisemitism.

A narrative of the widespread prevalence of risk also sends the message that the embrace of the community is safer than the wider world, according to Bourke.³⁸ For example, when the community's security expert described the threat of terrorism not only to synagogues and schools but also to the “soft-targets” of Jewish individuals, he links the threat to possession of Jewish identity, not just participation in Jewish institutions. This narrative links shared threat with shared identity, and involves the whole community in both the risk and the communal identity and its norms, regardless of their own individual levels of community involvement. This was echoed by Elsie, who offered the opinion that “a little bit of antisemitism here and our community would be more together … it would make us remember who we are.”

Sources of antisemitism

“I find it hard to believe, it's just about people's ability to be stupid.” (Tamar, 20 yrs, F)

The most common view from interview participants was that antisemitism came not from any sinister threatening source, but from generally uneducated members of wider society. Many pointed to the social and political environment of the state of Queensland as being particularly prone to encouraging intolerance. For instance, Jori claimed that “Queensland being the most conservative state in Australia and mildly racist I think is hard to deny”, and Gabe thought it was better in places “where the Jewish community is more visible, whether it might be that they can see different people and the way that [they live] … like in Melbourne, for example, in certain parts of Sydney.” Anti-Semites were described using terms like “uneducated”, “shallow” and “stupid.” Lower socioeconomic, regional and high immigrant populations were identified as sources of antisemitic sentiment – stories were recounted of spray-painted swastikas in Logan (a high-immigrant region south of the state capital of Brisbane), Holocaust-denial pamphlets printed in North Queensland, or threats coming from “drunk yelling bogans.”³⁹ They were seen as products of their own views and experiences, rather than representatives of mainstream society. Stereotypes were a common form of antisemitic rhetoric: Raphael observed that “you’d notice ‘Oh, that's because you’re a Jew’ would come up in conversation … I’d call that a soft form of antisemitism that hints at something darker.” Middle-Eastern political stereotypes often spilled across to become general Jewish stereotypes: Devir, an Israeli migrant who had become an Australian permanent resident, recounted an incident in a local bar where he had argued with a fellow patron over beer, and “he [the agitator] said ‘I don't want to piss you off, you probably have a bomb on you and you’re going to explode us.’” Whilst some identified the community's invisibility as a boon preventing serious antisemitism, it was also identified as a source of antisemitic ideas and comments: Gideon offered the opinion that “that's a more common form of antisemitism, that people just aren't aware that we’re here” and that when everyday people were unaware that there were Jews living as their friends and neighbours, they might resort more to stereotyping.

On many occasions, rising global populist politics were pointed to as a source for antisemitism –Susannah claimed “you see slightly more insidious things because there's a growing white nationalist movement here.” This was also reflected in official community discourse – at the community's Yom Hashoah service, several speakers directly linked the fascist and antisemitic sentiment behind the Holocaust to the rise of populism in contemporary global politics, and gave the specific example of Queensland senator Pauline Hanson and her populist right-wing One Nation political party. In naming One Nation within the narrative, populist politics and the sentiment of everyday Queensland voters are directly tied to antisemitism. When international populism and global antisemitic discourse was identified as a source for antisemitic sentiments in Australia, examples given were largely from a European and US context.

Another thread runs through the community's narrative on antisemitism which identifies Islam as a source. Most of this came from individual participants – for example, from Ruth, who theorized that Australian antisemitism came from “people [who] want to set up boundaries against Islamophobia and become Islamophilic, to the point of excluding Jewish people”, or from Omer, who mentioned “a Muslim element that would be anti-Jewish.” Internally, Islamic extremism was spoken about by community security experts - one community leader voiced the opinion that “it's difficult to consider the concept of moderate Muslims” at a community security briefing; another that “Islamic terrorists want to kill us.” Outwardly, the community performs a great deal of interfaith cooperative activity with local Islamic outreach groups. The community's interfaith spokesperson claimed that “what we do in our small local community to build relationships represents us well and promotes a safe and tolerant environment”, though he added at the same time that he was “not naïve about the world situation.” There was some sympathizing with Muslim experiences of Islamophobia at the hands of groups and individuals who might otherwise be antisemitic – Ezra observed that “They [antisemites] are focusing more on the Muslims than on the Jews at the moment, so as long as they keep it over there … ” Nevertheless, in both cases – a danger or an object of sympathy – the narrative bears a message of Jewish superiority, identifying the Muslim community either as the uneducated and underdeveloped anti-Semite, or as more Other and different to the mainstream than the Jewish community is.

In terms of the anthropology of fear, these trends again show how fear narratives work to convey particular messages. Firstly, the community repeatedly identifies antisemitic sentiment as coming from a lack of education, which immediately brands it not only as inferior, but fixable by educating. This rearranges the power dynamic between dominant antisemite and lesser Jew to a didactic relationship of reversed positions. Identifying ignorance as a source also promotes the idea of public, authentic identity performance as the fix, creating a space which encourages individuals to publicly live and act out their Jewish identity.

Secondly, the community ties such sentiment to poorer, rural or immigrant communities and philosophies. This serves to separate antisemitic ideas from the more worldly, cosmopolitan Australian mainstream with which the Jewish community negotiates its societal place. For example, when a community spokesperson identifies the intensifying neo-Nazi activity of the Antipodean Resistance far-right organization who are recruiting and putting out material outside Brisbane, he separates the regional and antisemitic from the urban, tolerant majority which geographically encapsulates the Jewish community. While a connection to global antisemitic discourse outside the Euro-American context might further such efforts, the fact that this does not really feature in local narratives of antisemitism likely comes down to the centrality of “Ashkenormativity” or Euro-American forms and models of Jewishness within the South-East Queensland Jewish community's identity.⁴⁰

Finally, the community identifies local populist political threats as a source of risk squarely in the community's backyard. Naming and identifying such a significant local risk source combats views that the lesser geographical visibility of the community in comparison with larger centres affords it some protection. This gives more legitimacy to messages of threat prevalence, and increases feelings of connectedness with communities in other cities. Aligning antisemitism directly with figures like Pauline Hanson also has the benefit of tying such sentiment to the popular narrative ridiculing Hanson as a clown and her associates as bumbling and ignorant;⁴¹ this furthers the narrative that antisemitism is the province of the foolish and uneducated.

Responses and reactions to fears

“I think the best way to respond is … by being really calm about it and offering education and representing Jewish people in a nice way, because we are nice people.” (Elli, 20 yrs, F)

Boscoboinik identifies three core forms of reaction to fear – active engagement, resigned acceptance, and confused denial.⁴² Whilst no evidence of outright denial is apparent, responses to antisemitism fear in South East Queensland vary between resigned acceptance and active engagement. There are significant trends within individual and communal behaviour regarding what is accepted and what is engaged with, and the reasons given.

The most common way in which the community and individual Jewish community members actively engage with their fear of antisemitism is through education. For the organized community, this takes the form of media statements and formal education programmes. Public acknowledgement and protest against antisemitic rhetoric and acts in the media is a core part of the Queensland Jewish Board of Deputies’ role, following the lead of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. For example, in Brisbane in December of 2017, an Israeli flag was publicly burned in a protest over the announcement that the United States of America was to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The Queensland Jewish Board of Deputies published an opinion piece two days later in the city's major newspaper, not only labelling the burning “an extreme and racist act … a disgrace … an attack on Queensland's multicultural values”, but directly linking the protests to a desire for “genocide”, and asking the question “What's next after burning flags? Targeting Israelis? Targeting Jews?”⁴³ The community runs a “Courage to Care” programme, which brings visiting exhibitions and guest speakers to local schools and cultural institutions to teach an anti-bullying and anti-racism message using Holocaust materials and examples, reaching 800 young people in local educational institutions annually. Many in the community thought it was not only the responsibility of Jews to educate, but that an active change needed to be made in national education programmes and curricula to educate on racism, antisemitism and Jewish issues: in the opinion of Jori, “I think if we had better education systems from a very early age, within a couple of generations you’d be able to reduce the whole thing.” Some people took opportunities to actively combat antisemitic thought by educating: Susannah shared series of Facebook posts in which she publicly chronicled her active engagement response to the discovery of a holocaust denial flyer on her car at her university campus:

Susannah: Someone left this flyer under my windscreen that was antisemitic. It was, there's that movie Denial about the Holocaust denier, and there were people putting flyers under windscreens about this alternative documentary which was saying about how that guy was a liar and the Holocaust never happened, there was “substantial evidence to dispute these so-called facts.” That made me really furious … I probably should have reported that to someone.

Interviewer: What did you do instead?

Susannah: I took a series of photos of me giving it the finger, setting it on fire and flushing the ashes down the toilet, and then I posted them on social media.

When asked why she chose to publicly document her engagement in this way, she responded “it was a way to let other people know that these attitudes are still out there, people are still spreading this sort of malice and it's happening and if you see it it's not okay.” In this way, Susannah not only uses a crudely defiant and darkly humorous response to disempower the antisemitic discourse of the flyer, but performs it publicly for her mainstream friends and acquaintances for educational purposes. Another approach is the performance of stereotype-defying activity. Gideon's approach was to “continue to do mitzvot, continue to be seeing doing the good things that we need to do on this planet”, and Gabe's “just being nice to people, doing good things, good deeds.” The efforts of the National Council of Jewish Women's local branch for non-Jewish causes in the wider community were highlighted, and the positive way this reflected on the Jewish community as a whole.

A preventative approach is also taken in the community's engagement with antisemitism; the Queensland Jewish Board of Deputies manages an organization of volunteer trained security personnel, the Community Security Group. This group performs security risk assessments and provides a small force of security officers for community events, both regular weekly religious services and larger religious or cultural events. In many Jewish communities interstate and overseas, security is significant and contributes to the perception by outsiders of the Jewish community as insular, or possessing a “fortress mentality.”⁴⁴ In contrast, Jewish communal security at events in South-East Queensland is relatively low-level, although in part this is due to a paucity of volunteers and funding, rather than of a communal sense of relative safety. There are often only one or two security personnel at smaller communal events, and no security infrastructure such as metal detectors in community facilities. However, at events in public spaces, or in Jewish spaces where members of the general public are invited in, security presence is always more noticeable, if not always more numerous. Help from external security, particularly the Queensland Police, is sometimes sought, and community authorities have made considerable efforts over the last few years to liaise directly with the state police force regarding antisemitism and the threats the community observe in society around them. Despite this, there is a prevailing sentiment within the community's narrative that, should a crisis come, the community is its own best defence: from a community leader at a security briefing event, “when it comes down to it, no matter how much we cultivate relationships with the police, if something happens then we’re alone together.”

Some individual community members take a similar preventative approach to the risk of antisemitism, undertaking training in self-defence like Krav Maga, a technique devised by the Israeli Defence Force and popular around the world amongst Jewish and non-Jewish individuals alike. A security briefing included a hands-on tutorial by local Krav Maga practitioners, simulating a knife attack and allowing community members to practice the techniques to best defend themselves. Krav Maga has the added benefit of its Israeli cultural basis, which connects the idea of Israeli culture, and thus Jewish culture, in protecting Jewish individuals. For example, from Australian-born participant Jonathan, who has become a Krav Maga practitioner over the past few years:

Jonathan: I was considering doing something in the martial arts realm, and I thought well, the Israelis have one, I should do that one.

Interviewer: So, the Israeli nature of it kind of drew you over? You felt more connected?

Jonathan: Yeah … it feels great when you walk down the stairs in this little basement to train, and they’ve got the Israeli flag on the wall.

Actively engaging with fear has distinct benefits to group cohesion, group identity, and the group's ability to negotiate with mainstream society. Whilst publicly-open events do bring an increase in level of risk, exposing community activity to the unknown, there is a powerful narrative of strength to be performed by having prominent security around Jewish activity. Security personnel are always publicly thanked at communal gatherings large and small. There is genuine gratitude in the community for their service, which in Queensland is completely on a trained but voluntary basis. However, the simple act of publicly thanking security personnel draws attention to and reinforces their presence and makes a statement to attendees that they are being watched over by the organized community in a way that evokes gratitude. Feelings of kinship are evoked by promoting the image of Jewish neighbours watching over each other. Communal responses to antisemitic events also become part of the community's collective memory and are retold as part of communal history with a sense of pride. For example, this narrative from Joseph:

One big experience for me was when the Nazis did their big public performance in Centenary Park in the Valley⁴⁵, would have been in the 1960s. And a call went out for men to go in, and my Dad went in and all my uncles, and I went with them. There was just blatant antisemitism, and I watched men, most of whom had lived through the Second World War, some of whom had actually been in Germany, had been in concentration camps and survived, even had numbers tattooed on their forearms. So that was a pretty defining moment in a young boy's life, that incident. And you know, they chased the Nazis away.

Actively engaging with antisemitism is also used as an opportunity to reposition the community as aligned with the mainstream, affording it the protections inherent in being part of the majority. The community's press release writer stated pointedly that“Our community has, for more than 150 years, actively contributed to the fabric of Queensland society.”⁴⁶ Although speaking of his own personal background, the writer establishes a performative communal Jewish identity in which the Queensland Jew is an active long-term contributor to society, and this identity can be shared by the whole local Jewish community regardless of their own birthplace or length of residency. Narratives from interviews also echoed this alignment of Jewish and mainstream; from Rena “We need to be interacting with as many people as we can, so they can see us as being normal, as being acceptable people”, and from Omer:

Having Muslims as friends, having Christians as friends, having Hindus as friends, and interacting with them as a community, and being out there, not insulating ourselves in our Jewish community but being out there in the whole community.

Active engagement in interfaith activity is another way that antisemitism is engaged with and the community positions itself within the multicultural state framework. Community leaders actively engage with leaders in the local Muslim community in particular, through attendance at each other's community events and joint statements and interactions when there are issues both of antisemitism and anti-Muslim sentiment in popular discourse and media. However, unlike in the United Kingdom and United States,⁴⁷ there is little day-to-day interaction between the broader Jewish and Muslim communities in South-East Queensland; much like the case in Amsterdam in the Netherlands,⁴⁸ both populations are dispersed across the region, and where there are concentrations these are not in shared centres.

In some scenarios, however, the community's response to fear of antisemitism is one of resigned acceptance – for example, no official comment was made when local One Nation political candidate Mark Ellis mowed a swastika shape into the grass of his backyard in early 2017,⁴⁹ and no official Queensland Jewish response was made to Queensland-based author Helen Demidenko's controversial Holocaust apologetic novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper, when it was published in the 1990s.⁵⁰ Most official responses against Queensland-based antisemitism come from Sydney or Melbourne-based authorities, not local Queensland ones. Individual community narratives also describe some resigned acceptance: Dalya, who encountered protestors whilst working in retail selling Israeli products, remarked “We’d get heaps of shit, people coming and yelling at us, saying “if you buy it you’re terrorists”, this and that … [but] it's not something I’d report to the Board [of Deputies].” Dalya had previously reported antisemitic graffiti to the Queensland Jewish Board of Deputies but was unwilling to report face-to-face attacks of this nature. Matty commented that “it's hard when people are your friends and you have to say, ‘let's not make jokes about Jew gold, shall we?’” Here, Matty displays resigned acceptance of his friends’ antisemitic discourse within their relationship. Alisa also demonstrated acceptance of friends’ antisemitic rhetoric, in particular in the online space: “I have become a lot more hesitant to say what I think. Especially on Facebook, as some of the attacks are from people I know.”

At the heart of this point of differentiation between engagement with, and acceptance of, antisemitic sentiment and threats lies the interplay of power between mainstream Australian society, and its representative actors, and the Jewish minority culture. As Ambalavaner Sivanandan suggests, “racism is about power, not prejudice.”⁵¹ Antisemitism takes on power when it is used to discriminate and subjugate. Likewise, Butler reasons that if all speech and action is performative, and the performative is at heart about power, then hate speech (including antisemitism) deprives its target of their own performative power, and effect subordination.⁵² However, Butler also offers the opinion that hate speech and racist acts only really become real, in a legal sense, once they reach the courts, and that targets give legal reality to racism by engaging juridically with it.⁵³ Following this distinction, the very act of engaging with antisemitic sentiment identifies it as powerful and bestows power on it. When the community performs a lack of engagement with antisemitic discourse, it signals that it is not in a subjugated position to the antisemitic speaker or actor, and renders it powerless. Thus, resigned acceptance is not so much a resignation as a decision to prohibit the discourse from taking power over its target.

Discussion and conclusion

Reflecting on the South-East Queensland Jewish community's experiences and discourses of antisemitism – its prevalence, its sources and the best ways to react and respond to it – clear parallels can be seen with anthropological theories and explorations of fear in other settings. When the community talks up the prevalence of antisemitism to increase feelings of value of Jewishness, this echoes Low's study on gated suburban communities where fear prevalence discourse is used as a sign (both rhetorical and literal) of a need to protect high-value homes from those who would rob them;⁵⁴ in the same way, there is a need to protect high-value Jewishness, and Jewish life, from those who would despoil it. When talking up prevalence and drawing on the visual rhetoric of security to draw the community closer, this echoes Green's study of fear of political violence in Guatemala, where fear is part of a social memory within the community;⁵⁵ just as fear was part of a shared historical culture and its effects forged a commonality and sense of closeness and sharing among Green's Guatemalan women interlocutors, drawing on a shared history and global commonality of Jewish fear and danger connects Jews in South-East Queensland together and to broader global (though Euro-American centred) Jewish belonging. When positioning the source of antisemitism and actively engaging with it by positioning it as “out there” rather than part of the mainstream, this echoes Low's respondents who position those they fear as “poor people”, “ethnic” and “Mexicans”;⁵⁶ just as these feared perpetrators are different from the wealthy white residents of the gated community, the uneducated, rural/regional and other religious minority are cast as different from the Jewish community and the tolerant, cosmopolitan majority. Finally, when talking down the fear of antisemitism, or resignedly accepting it, to disempower its messages and perpetrators, this echoes Pettigrew & Adhikari's Nepalese respondents who denied fear to empower themselves and ridicule perpetrators;⁵⁷ just as downplaying and not reacting fearfully to fears performs a “manliness” that Pettigrew and Adhikari point out is not only limited to men but also to women, Jewish individuals and communities push back against stereotypes of weak and effeminate Jews and make themselves more powerful than perpetrators.⁵⁸

It would be unwise to dismiss the fears of antisemitism within the Jewish community as mere paranoia or a tendency toward the same sort of intolerance by Jews as they themselves suffer at the hands of antisemites. As Boscoboinik points out, “stating that risks are socially constructed does not imply that the risks do not exist.”⁵⁹ Antisemitic speech and acts can exist in any community, and there is no reason to doubt the veracity of the evidence provided in the Executive Council of Australian Jewry's report or the narratives of the local community.

Nevertheless, it is the narratives told about this risk, rather than the existence of risk itself, which speak more to the way in which the fear of antisemitism is experienced and performed for the community and for dominant society. Through looking at the ways in which attitudes and approaches towards antisemitism are influenced by cultural identity, and at the same time are performed to reinforce that cultural identity within the community and to outsiders, an understanding can be developed of how Jewish communities like that in South-East Queensland position themselves and their culture within the multicultural framework of the society in which they live. Such understanding, as outlined in this paper, brings a new comparative perspective to anthropologies of fear, and a new anthropological perspective to the study of contemporary antisemitism internationally.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge the generous feedback of the anonymous peer reviewer on an earlier draft of this work, and the guidance of Professor Emeritus David Trigger and Associate Professor Gerhard Hoffstaedter, both of the School of Social Science, The University of Queensland. The author also thanks the Queensland Jewish Board of Deputies for authorizing access to community events for observation, along with the members of the South-East Queensland Jewish Community who shared their experiences through interviews. This work was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Programme scholarship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Creese

Jennifer Creese is a Lecturer in Health Sciences at the University of Leicester, UK. A social anthropologist, she specializes in mental health, wellbeing and identity in migrant professionals and communities, including religious minority communities, across Australia, Ireland and the United Kingdom.

Notes

1 Lewis, “The New Anti-Semitism.”

2 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, Working Definition of Antisemitism. The IHRA Definition of Antisemitism lists eleven areas where expression might be considered antisemitic, including “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor”; on this point the Definition has been challenged by several Progressive Jewish groups around the world, who have come up with alternative definitions which allow for reasonable criticism of the Israeli state's actions towards Palestinian citizens; for example, the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism.

3 Lewis, “The New Anti-Semitism”; Seliktar, Divided we Stand.

4 Ahdar and Leigh, Religious Freedom in the Liberal State.

5 Particularly in Australia, Muslim communities spoke out about fear and safety concerns after the 2019 mass shootings at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, by an Australian national: see Powell, “Brisbane's Holland Park Mosque Vandalised”.

6 Hage, White Nation.

7 For example, a series of assaults and murders of Indian students in Melbourne, Australia in 2019-2010, identified as racial hate crimes by Victorian Police, lead to widespread fear among the Indian community in the state, and led to the Indian government issuing warnings to its own citizens to avoid travel to Melbourne. See Singh, “Indian Students in Melbourne”.

8 Scruton, “Anthropology of an Emotion,” 9.

9 Boscoboinik, “Risks and Fears,” 11.

10 Scruton, “Anthropology of an Emotion,” 42.

11 Bourke, Fear, 191.

12 Boscoboinik, “Risks and Fears,” 45.

13 Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 781.

14 Butler, Excitable Speech.

15 Green, “Fear as a Way of Life,” 238.

16 Low, “The Edge and the Center.”

17 Pettigrew and Adhikari, “Fear and Everyday Life,” 257.

18 As per Jacobs-Huey, “The Natives are Gazing and Talking Back.”

19 Tedlock, “From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation,” 69.

20 Levy and Hollan, “Person-centered Interviewing and Observation,” 296.

21 Cortazzi, “Narrative Analysis in Ethnography.”

22 For more on the history of this community see Creese, Jewish Life in Queensland.

23 Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2016 Census of Population and Housing.

24 This phenomenon is described in a UK context by Graham and Waterman, “Underenumeration of the Jewish Population.”

25 The migrant identities of this community are discussed further in Creese, “Negotiating and Performing ‘Jewish Australian’ Identity.”

26 Throughout, all participant names are pseudonyms, in line with the ethical guidelines of the Australian Anthropological Society and the European Association of Social Anthropologists.

27 “Brisbane 6th in the non-Arab non-Muslim World.”

28 Nathan, “Antisemitism in Australia,” 25.

29 Ibid., 29.

30 Ibid., 53.

31 Rebhun, “Anti-Semitism among Jews in the United States,” 46.

32 Furedi, Culture of Fear, xi.

33 Benbassa and Attias, quoted in Robinson, “Anti-Semitism in Twenty-first Century Canada,” 179.

34 Seliktar, Divided we Stand, 11.

35 Rebhun, “Anti-Semitism among Jews in the United States,” 46.

36 Bourke, Fear.

37 Douglas, “Risk and Danger.”

38 Bourke, Fear.

39 “Bogan” is an Australian slang term for an unsophisticated, uncouth and boorish person, usually from a lower social class (though more to do with mentality and presentation than wealth).

40 Creese, “Negotiating and Performing ‘Jewish Australian’Identity,” 1289–90.

41 Horsfield and Stewart, “One Nation and the Australian Media.”

42 Boscoboinik, “Risks and Fears,” 13.

43 Steinberg, “Burning of an Israeli Flag in Brisbane.”

44 For example, see Samson, “White Noise and Unnecessary Evil,” 7.

45 Fortitude Valley, an inner-city suburb of the city of Brisbane, Queensland

46 Steinberg, “Burning of an Israeli Flag in Brisbane.”

47 Egorova and Ahmed, “Jewish-Muslim Relations in the UK”, Soomekh, “Integration or Separation.”

48 Roggeveen et al., “Cooperation in Turbulent Times”

49 Nathan, “Antisemitism in Australia.”

50 Manne, The Culture of Forgetting.

51 Quoted by Hage, White Nation, 32.

52 Butler, Excitable Speech, 81.

53 Ibid., 97-98.

54 Low, “The Edge and the Center.”

55 Green, “Fear as a Way of Life.”

56 Low, “The Edge and the Center.”

57 Pettigrew and Adhikari, “Fear and Everyday Life”

58 Australian Jews in particular have a long history of “muscular Judaism” and challenging antisemitic stereotypes through physical fitness, strength and sport; see Hughes, “Sport in the Australian Jewish community.”

59 Boscoboinik, “Risks and Fears from an Anthropological Viewpoint,” 11.