Swedish Antisemitism Survey Admits What Most European Surveys Bury ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Thursday, June 18, 2026

Swedish Antisemitism Survey Admits What Most European Surveys Bury

Sweden's government tracks antisemitism the way few other countries do. Every five years the Forum för levande historia (Living History Forum) commissions a national survey of attitudes toward Jews, and the new edition comparing 2020 and 2025 is out. The headline not surprising. After fifteen years of steady decline, antisemitic attitudes reversed direction, with an average rise of roughly 15 percent across all three measured indices — traditional and Holocaust-related antisemitism, social distance from Jews, and Israel-related antisemitism. The largest single change was the erosion of the people who used to actively reject these statements, many of whom slid from "strongly disagree" into a noncommittal middle. That passive normalization is the real story of the deterioration.

The numbers are sobering on their own. Strong acceptance of a Jewish prime minister fell from 50 to 41 percent. The share doubling down on hard anti-Jewish social distance doubled from 2 to 4 percent. The proportion actively rejecting the dual-loyalty trope that Swedish Jews care more about Israel than Sweden collapsed from 38 to 22 percent. The Israel-related index showed the sharpest movement of all, with 43 percent of Swedes now agreeing with at least one of its statements.

The report is unusual in that it faces a major question head-on: what do immigrants from Uslim and Middle Eastern countries think about Jews?

The standard European approach treats immigrant antisemitism as radioactive. Surveys measure it, find it, and then either omit it from the published summary or surround it with so many caveats that the finding disappears. They sre concerned that acknowledging that arrivals from the Middle East and North Africa carry higher baseline antisemitism hands ammunition to the anti-immigration right, so the data gets buried to deny that ammunition.

This survey didn't flinch.

Individuals born in the MENA region scored about 17 percent higher on traditional and Holocaust-related antisemitism than the reference group of Swedes born to Swedish-born parents. Those born in non-MENA Asia scored 14 percent higher and those from non-MENA Africa 12 percent higher. Respondents identifying as Muslim scored 14 to 18 percent higher across all three indices, with no statistically significant elevation found among Christians or other faiths relative to the non-religious baseline. The authors ground this in social learning theory and point to international polling, including the ADL's global surveys, showing that antisemitism is far more mainstream and politically normalized across the Middle East and North Africa than in Western Europe. People carry the norms of their society of origin when they move.

However, the immigrants aren't the major factor in the increase of antisemitism in Sweden. Even controlling for country of birth, parental background, and religion, a 15 to 16 percent increase remained — which means most of the worsening came from native Swedes changing their minds, not from demographic replacement.

I think the report's definition of "Israel related antisemitism" is poor. The four-statement Israel-related index asks if Israel's policies make the respondent dislike Jews, that the world cannot have peace while Israel exists, that Israeli policy reflects an Old Testament vengefulness. These are really traditional antisemitic tropes wearing an Israeli costume. They invoke the word "Jews" directly or reach for ancient conspiracy and theological motifs. They miss the coded forms of Israel-centered antisemitism that hide entirely behind political vocabulary, the "Israelis are the new Nazis" register that weaponizes Holocaust inversion without ever naming Jews. The authors left the Nazi-analogy question out deliberately, worried that "Nazi" has decayed into generic political insult and would muddy their data. That choice keeps the index thematically clean at the cost of undercounting the most current and most slippery variety of the prejudice it set out to measure.

That methodological conservatism makes the headline numbers an undercount rather than an exaggeration. A narrow instrument that still registers a 15 percent jump and 43 percent maximal spread is measuring a floor.

The Swedish report shows that a government body can collect uncomfortable data about immigration and antisemitism, publish it without flinching, and still refuse to let that data be conscripted into a single political narrative. The honesty is the model worth copying. Most of Europe has the same data sitting in its drawers and lacks the nerve to print the inconvenient half.

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