EUROPE AND THE MIDDLE EAST
Despite the tumult, mass migrations, and genocides of the past century and a half, more than half of the world’s Jewish population–more than eight million people–live in Europe and the Middle East. The centre of gravity of the regional Jewish population has shifted to the south and west, though, away from the eastern European plains towards the lands bordering the Mediterranean Sea.
BRITISH ISLES (ENGLAND, IRELAND, EAST ULSTER, SCOTLAND, WALES, ASSOCIATED ISLES):
The British Isles’ Jewish population of 900 thousand is the largest Jewish population in the non-Latin world. Although a Jewish presence in the British Isles dates to Roman times, the archipelago’s modern Jewish population is largely descended from late 19th and early 20th century Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire, particularly from the future Baltic States and Poland. The modern Jewish population of the British Isles is overwhelmingly urbanized and concentrated in England–a half-million British Jews live in greater London, and another quarter-million live in the industrial cities of northern England. (Edinburgh is the centre of Scottish Jewish life, with some 40 thousand Jews in the Scottish capital.) Though the Council of Jews of the British Isles does maintain archipelago-wide community services, by and large British Jews have been assimilated into their surroundings, with anti-Semitic prejudice rare, fluency in Yiddish and Hebrew low, and intermarriage with non-Jews relatively high at two-fifths of all marriages contracted by Jews.
LOW COUNTRIES (THE NETHERLANDS, BELGIUM, LUXEMBOURG):
The Jewish communities of the Low Countries–110 thousand in Belgium, 130 thousand in the Netherlands, five thousand in Luxembourg–trace their roots from 17th century migrations, although later waves of Polish immigrants and German refugees bolstered local Jewish communities. Nazi mass killings in the eastern Netherlands and Luxembourg claimed tens of thousands of lives, but the main Jewish communities–in the Dutch city of Amsterdam, and the Belgian cities of Antwerp and Brussels–survived the Second World War intact. Although Antwerp’s eighty thousand Jews are largely Orthodox and still maintain a vibrant community centred on Jewish religious practice and general use of the Yiddish language, while Israeli immigration to Flanders remains constant, Jews elsewhere in the Low Countries have largely assimilated to their surroundings. In the Netherlands, the Dutch government subsidizes a Jewish community “pillar,” which administers Jewish day schools, secular cultural centres, and two Jewish hospitals.
NORDEN (DENMARK, NORWAY, SWEDEN, FINLAND, KARELIA, ESTONIA):
The Jewish population of the Nordic states–some 400 thousand Jews–is almost entirely a product of early 20th century migration from the eastern Baltic, particularly Lithuania and Latvia. Although Denmark and Estonia were invaded by the Nazis during the Second World War, almost their entire Jewish populations had been evacuated respectively to Sweden and Finland ahead of the Nazis. The absence of any noticeable anti-Semitism has allowed Norden’s prosperous and disproportionatly professional Jewish communities to prosper, despite the extreme secularization of Nordic Christian and Jewish communities alike; indeed, although almost all marriages contracted by Jews in Norden are with non-Jews, a near-majority of children in these marriages are raised–at least nominally–as Jews.
CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE (POLAND, LITHUANIA, LATVIA, BELARUS, UKRAINE, RUSSIAN STATES):
Before the Second World War, this region was home to more than six million Jews. The Jewish culture of this third of world Jewry–known as the Ashkenazim–thrived, in small villages and large metropoli alike, maintaining a vibrant secular literature in the Yiddish language, distinctive musical and artistic traditions, and–in Warsaw and Vilnius (Polish Wilno) especially–a status as the homeland of the world Jewish diaspora. This community was largely destroyed by the Holocaust, which left only a million and a half survivors, including one million in Russia and a quarter-million in Poland. In the generation after the Second World War mass emigration to Israel further depleted Jewish numbers, first in Poland and the Baltic States, then in the Soviet Union, while the Third World War killed two-thirds of the Russian republic’s remnant Jewish population of 400 thousand people. Central and eastern Europe is now home to only one hundred thousand Jews, most of whom now live in Poland; Warsaw has gained a new importance, attracting not only Polish Jews but Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe as well as a growing contingent of Israelis. Anti-Semitism remains a visible presence in many parts of this area, but it is officially condemned.
CZECHOSLOVAKIA, YUGOSLAVIA, HUNGARY:
Before the Second World War, more than a million Jews lived in the non-Germanic successor states of the Hapsburg empire–a quarter-million in Czechoslovakia, 700 thousand in Hungary, thirty thousand in Yugoslavia. Although levels of anti-Semitism associated with the Roman Catholic Church and peasant grievances were relatively high across this region, anti-Semitic persecution–whether by mobs or by governments–was comparatively rare. During the Nazi incursion into central Europe, a hundred thousand Czechoslovak Jews were murdered by Nazi death squads, but Jewish populations elsewhere in the region survived intact. Jewish life in this region is overwhelmingly concentrated in Hungary, home to one million Jews; the Jewish communities in eastern Czechoslovakia and in Yugoslavia look to their much larger and more prosperous Hungarian counterparts for financial support and theological guidance. Hungarian Jews tend themselves to be highly-assimilated, often identifying themselves not as Jews but as Magyars of Jewish confession; the Hasidic minorities in eastern Hungary proper are the only exceptions to this rule.
GERMANY, BAVARIA, AUSTRIA, SAXONY, BRANDENBURG:
In the early 1930’s, some seven hundred thousand Jews lived in the German-speaking states of central Europe, with Berlin and Vienna home to the largest communities at just under two hundred thousand Jews each. The institution of anti-Semitic policies by the Nazi regime across Greater Germany provoked a mass exodus of fully a third of this Jewish population, some to France and the Low Countries, more to Poland. At the end of the Second World War, only some thirty thousand Jews remained in the area, most of these being highly-assimilated Jews who were Jewish only by Nazi racial laws. Most of even this remnant population emigrated to various Southern Hemisphere destinations in the decade after the Second World War. In the 1970’s, however, the prosperity of the German states attracted tens of thousands of Russian Jewish immigrants; Germany’s Frankfurt and Hamburg, and Brandenburg’s Berlin, attracted particularly large numbers of Jews. There are currently 120 thousand Jews in German-speaking central Europe, of which forty thousand live in Berlin.
SWITZERLAND:
Switzerland’s sparse Jewish community of twenty thousand–concentrated in the major cities of Zürich, Berne, and Genève–is the product of early 20th century immigration by Polish and Austrian Jews. Although the traditional insular attitudes and innate conservatism of the Swiss have been blamed for Swiss anti-Semitism, Switzerland’s traditionally weak governments and laissez-faire attitudes have limited manifestations of anti-Semitism. Modern Swiss Jews tend to be assimilated; fluency in Yiddish is rare, practicing religious Jews number only a fifth of the total Swiss Jewish population, and a large majority of Swiss Jews practice exogamy.
FRANCE:
France, home to an estimated 1.5 million Jews as of 2002 (out of a total national population of roughly 72.5 million), is home to the third-largest Jewish community in the diaspora behind only Argentina and Brazil. Successive waves of immigrants–central and eastern European immigrants from the 1870’s to the 1930’s, Greater German refugees in the 1930’s, Moroccan and Algerian Sephardim in the 1950’s, Romanian Ashkenazim in the 1960’s, and Russians in the 1970’s–have created one of the most diverse Jewish communities in existence. Concentrated in Paris, Marseilles, and the eastern and northern departments, French Jews are divided into two communities: a prosperous bourgeois community, substantially suburban, made up of Jews descending from Jewish immigrants from elsewhere in Europe, and a poor minority made up of poorly-educated Moroccan and Romanian immigrants, united only by the Consistory–the national union of Jewish religious congregation. Despite a tumultuous history of anti-Semitism in the last quarter of the 19th century, anti-Semitism is a non-issue in modern France save among the large community of Arab immigrants, for whom old Muslim-Jewish rivalries in the Maghreb remain active. French Jews are prominent in the highest levels of popular culture, the economy, and government, even including two Jewish prime ministers.
SPAIN, PORTUGAL:
Although the Iberian peninsula was the nursery for the Sephardic segment of the Jewish diaspora, Jewish communities only began to appear in Spain and Portugal in the 1960’s, with the economic immigration of Moroccan Jews to Spain and a growing number of Brazilian Jewish vacationers in inexpensive Lusophone Portugal. Though Spanish and Portuguese Jewish citizens enjoy full civil and political rights, lignering anti-Semitism from the reconquista period and in the still-powerful Roman Catholic Church troubles Christian-Jewish relations, while many Spanish Jews remain Moroccan citizens and are quite poor.
ITALY:
Though there has been a Jewish presence in Italy since the early days of the Roman Empire, the modern Italian Jewish community of 30 thousand people–concentrated in the prosperous cities of the northern Italian states and in Rome–is well on its way to disappearance, a product of a low birth rate, intermarriage with Italian non-Jews, and post-Second World War emigration to South America and Israel. Despite the conservatism of the Roman Catholic Church, anti-Semitism is quite rare in Italy; if anything, the main problem of Italian Jews is their very high rate of assimilation.
MAGHREB (MOROCCO, ALGERIA, LIBYA):
Roughly 1.1 million Jews live in the countries of the Maghreb, since the late 15th century home to the major concentrations of the Sephardic segment of the Jewish diaspora. Of this number, 900 thousand are Algerians, with most of the remainder concentrated in Morocco. Although Jews enjoy full civil rights in the Maghrebin countries–in Algeria and Libya, a conscious project of French and Italian colonial policies aimed at increasing the size of the non-Muslim citizen populations of these colonies of settlement–and are prominent in the business world, anti-Semitism remains relatively high, particularly among Maghrebin Muslims, while emigration is a problem particularly for Moroccan Jews.
BALKANS (ROMANIA, BULGARIA, SERBIA, ALBANIA, GREECE, CONSTANTINOPLE):
The Jews of the Balkans can be divided into two major communities: the four hundred thousand Romanian Jews and twenty thousand Serbian Jews, both Ashkenazim, and the two hundred thousand Sephardic Jews of the southern Balkans. Levels of anti-Semitism have traditionally been high across the region, particularly in Romania; this, along with historically low standards of living in the region, has propelled since the 1950’s a large-scale emigration of Jews to western Europe and Israel, particularly from Romania. Despite this mass emigration, however, Jewish communities in the Balkans remain strongly resistant to assimilation in part because of the long-standing confessionalization of life in the Balkans, with community-operated day schools, hospitals, and cultural centres visible across the region. The situation of Greek Jews is particularly enviable, as the post-Second World War Greek economic boom has allowed the 100 thousand Greek Jews to recover from their impoverished nadir in the 1930’s; Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city and home to 70 thousand Greek Jews, has particularly boomed with the recovery of regional trade, while Smyrna’s Jewish community has grown thanks to the immigration of Turkish Jews over the past half-century.
BLACK SEA LANDS (GEORGIA, ARMENIA, NORTH CAUCASUS, TREBIZOND, TURKEY):
Although the earliest-recorded Jewish communities of the Black Sea lands date to the first diaspora, in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, the early 20th century’s repeated wars and the late 20th century’s mass emigration of Jews to Israel have reduced this area’s Jewish population to a mere 30 thousand Jews, most in Trebizond and Georgia. Continuing emigration, naturally aging, and growing intermarriage with non-Jewish majorities continues to weaken the fabric of Jewish community life in the Black Sea lands. Already, the Jewish communities of Armenia and Turkey have become defunct; Jewish communities elsewhere may be only a generation behind.
EGYPT:
Though Egypt has been home to significant Jewish diaspora communities since the 7th century CE, mid-20th century tensions over the creation of Israel nearly precipitated an ugly anti-Semitism that could well have destroyed the Egyptian Jewish community. Fortunately for Egyptian Jews and their non-Jewish neighbours, adroit statesmanship and outside mediation over the Palestine issue avoided the worst possible reaction, and Egypt’s small native-born Jewish community of fifty thousand people–concentrated in Alexandria and Cairo–remains as it long has, a prosperous, liberal, and Europeanized (often Francophone) community adroit at avoiding political problems. An interesting recent phenomenon has been the immigration of a quarter-million Jews, including an estimated hundred thousand Israelis looking for professional positions in prosperous and central Egypt which are unavailable in smaller and poorer Israel, and 150 thousand Yemenite refugees from poverty and oppression. Native-born Egyptian and Israeli Jews rarely mix, Yemenite Jews remain largely confined to their immigrant ghettos, and there are often tensions between the more assimilated Egyptian Jews, the more self-consciously Jewish Israeli Jews, and the impoverished and jealous Yemenite Jews.
ISRAEL:
The success of the Zionist movement in providing a Palestinian homeland for the Jewish diaspora can be measured by the simple fact that an estimated 3.2 million Jews–one-fifth of the Jewish diaspora’s population–live within the frontiers of Israel. A democratic state with Second World standards of living, more than 95% of Israel’s population is Jewish, equally divided between the Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox strains (although lately Orthodox Jewish influence has been rising along with the increase in the Orthodox Jewish population). Yiddish and Hebrew are the co-official languages of Israel, but several dozen other languages including French, Spanish, Polish, English, Arabic, and Russia are spoken by recent immigrants. Though Israeli life has problems–not least of which is the growth of conservative religious influence, slow economic growth, and an “Israeli diaspora” that has seen the emigration worldwide of almost one million Israeli citizens–Israel is nonetheless a vital and exciting state, the only Jewish polity to have emerged in the world since 70 CE and in its decentralized cooperative-based economic structure one of the most interesting experiments in political economy to have developed anywhere.
JERUSALEM:
Following the 1947 Palestinian civil war, the establishment of Jerusalem as a League Free City–independent both of Jewish Israel and Arab Palestine–was vital in defusing the most acute nationalistic tensions. Despite Jewish/Muslim conflict in the past, the neutral city administration has presided over a gradual cooling of tensions between Jerusalem’s major populations. Of Jerusalem’s four hundred thousand inhabitants, a quarter-million are Jewish, of mixed Israeli immigrant Yiddish/Hebrew-speaking Sephardic indigenous Ladino-speaking backgrounds, concentrated in the west of the Free City. As of late, latent Ashenazic/Sephardic tensions have begun to take priority over older conflicts; some outside observers suggest that the mutual dislike felt by the two major Jewish subpopulations for each other could spread beyond Jerusalem into the wider diaspora.
LEVANT:
The attraction of Israeli standards of living and (in independent Palestine and Syria) latent tensions with non-Jewish majorities over the partition of Palestine has propelled the emigration of the hundred thousand Syrian and Palestinian Jews to Israel, as part of the post-partition migrations. Lebanon’s Jewish community of ten thousand–sharing a strong Francophilia with Lebanon’s Maronite Christian majority–remains intact, however.
YEMEN:
Though the Yemenite segment of the Jewish diaspora had existed for two millennia prior to the creation of Israel, levels of anti-Semitism not far from the worst found in medieval Europe and grinding poverty propelled a massive emigration of Yemenite Jews to Israel. Although a few hundred elderly Jews have remained in their home villages, while a growing number of Israeli tourists visit their ancestral homes, Yemen’s ancient Jewish past is now a thing for history books.
IRAQ:
Before Israeli independence, the 150 thousand Jews of Iraq–concentrated around Baghdad–lived in what was perhaps the oldest community of the Jewish diaspora on Earth, dating back as early as the 6th century BCE. Iraqi Jews–Arabic-speaking, well-educated, urbanized–formed an integral element of the Iraqi ethnoreligious mosaic. The rapid growth of Iraqi anti-Semitism over the 1930’s, however, culminating in a series of brutal pogroms during the Second World War as part of an attempted pro-Nazi revolution, provoked a mass exodus of Iraqi Jews to Israel, while the strongly Islamic sentiments of the Iraqi monarchy (both before and after the Third World War) encouraged further emigration. Today, only several hundred Jews remain in Iraq, most holding Israeli citizenship in case they need to escape.
IRAN AND FORMER SOVIET ASIA:
The ancient Jewish communities of Iran and Turkestan have been greatly diminished by the aftermath of the Third World War, as (respectively) Iran’s Islamic revolution and Turkestan’s wartime depopulation have sharply reduced Jewish numbers. Seventy thousand Jews remain in Iran; though they are guaranteed political representation and a self-governing community life by the Iranian constitution, past instances of state anti-Semitism have spurred significant emigration. The recent election of a moderate government has stemmed the exodus of Iranian Jews to Israel for the time being.
AFRICA
Although more than three-quarters of Africa’s 300 thousand Jews are descended from relatively recent immigrants to South Africa, in parts of eastern Africa there are some surprisingly well-established crypto-Jewish and neo-Jewish populations, many of which are working actively to maintain their Jewish heritage.
ETHIOPIA:
Though the fifty thousand Beta Israel–once known as the pejorative “Falasha”–may, in fact, more properly trace their roots to early Christianity than to Judaism, the Beta Israel nonetheless continue to identify themselves as Jews. Traditionally the subject of popular hostility in Ethiopia’s highly-stratified society, post-War convulsions have propelled a mass emigration of Beta Israel to Israel, where forty thousand Beta Israel now live. Their African appearance and generally low levels fo education has made assimilation into mainstream Israeli society difficult, with accusations of racism. Most of the remaining Beta Israel in Ethiopia live in the capital of Addis Ababa.
ZIMBABWE:
The widespread adoption of Judaism by the Lemba people of southern Zimbabwe in the 1980’s surprised many outside observers. The Lemba origin myth claims that their distant ancestors emigrated from a point in the Middle East, either Yemen or the Levant, at some point no more recent than a thousand years ago. As unlikely as this myth might appear, traditional Lemba customs along with more recent genetic tests do seem to confirm this myth. The conversion of thirty thousand Lemba to mainstream Judaism by an unusually radical Reform missionary sect from Israel in the 1980’s after the Third World War created, overnight, an unusual segment of the Jewish diaspora that is still trying to find its place into the main circles of Judaism. Anti-Semitism in Zimbabwe is next to nonexistent, though it is growing almost imperceptibly.
SOUTH AFRICA:
The quarter-million Jews of South Africa trace their ancestry to the late 19th and early 20th century immigration of Jews from modern Belarus and Lithuania, searcing for employment in the booming area of Gauteng. Well-educated and prosperous, following the destruction of Jewish life in Belarus and Lithuania Gauteng has become the de facto centre of the Belarusian-Lithuanian segment of the Jewish diaspora. Rates of assimilation remain low despite the general prosperity of South African Jews; practice of the Jewish religion (mainly the Conservative and Orthodox branches), fluency in Yiddish, and endogamy remain high. Recently, South African Jewish life has been shaken by the conversion of the Lemba to Judaism; community leaders remain divided on how to respond to this most unexpected addition to southern Africa’s Jewish communities, with accusations of racism being casually tossed by both sides of the debate.
ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA
With the exceptions of the Jews of the Kerala coast, and small Jewish communities in the Dutch East Indies and British Singapore, the Jewish presence in Asia and Australasia dates back only to the late 19th century, with the beginning of large-scale Jewish emigration from Europe. Even now, the Jewish presence in this vast area, more than one-half of the world, is quite sparse.
SOUTH INDIA:
Before their mass emigration to Israel in the 1950’s, the Keralite Jews, living on the southwestern coast of India, were traditionally a merchant population depending on cross-Indian Ocean trade. Though anti-Semitism as such was nonexistent, Keralite Jews were forced to conform to India’s complex caste system, and were unable to marry outside their de facto caste.
AUSTRALIA:
Australia’s Jewish community–now numbering some 400 thousand people, living mainly in the coastal cities of the states of New South Wales and Victoria–is a product of a large wave of Jewish immigration beginning in the 1890’s and continuing until the 1920’s when Australia began to exclude non-western European immigrants for thirty years. Mainly composed of practitioners of the Reform and Conservative branches of Judaism, Australian Jews are highly assimilated into Australian culture, more so even than their British counterparts.
AMERICAS
Though Spanish and Portuguese converts from Judaism were present in the Americas almost with the first explorations of the Western Hemisphere, and Sephardic Jews were present in Britain’s North American colonies from the mid-17th century, the Americas’ Jewish communities only began to rapidly expand from the mid-19th century with the beginnings of massive Jewish immigration. Now, more than six million Jews live in the Americas.
NORTH AMERICAN STATES:
Before the Third World War, six hundred thousand Jews lived in the territory of the modern Confederation of North America, including a half-million Jews in the United States, mainly descended from 17th century Sephardic and 19th century German Jewish immigrants. Despite occasional anti-Semitism, growing sharply under the Nixon and Chang regimes, the United States’ Jewish community–concentrated in the metropoli of the northeastern states–remained prosperous and immune from major armed attacks. In the several years before the Third World War, almost half of the United States’ Jewish population managed to emigrate, primarily to Israel but also to Canada, particularly to Montréal where fifty thousand American immigrants joining another fifty thousand descendants of early 20th century eastern European Jewish immigrants. Almost all of the Jews remaining in the United States in September of 1982 died, with the exception of the thirty thousand Francophone Jews of Louisiana and the fifty thousand Jews of Cuba.
COSTA RICA:
Costa Rica’s humane decision, in the 1930’s, to offer automatic citizenship to Jewish refugees from Greater Germany paid off handsomely, as it is in part the immigration of skilled central European Jewish professionals and their families that allowed Costa Rica to catch up with its richer South American neighbours. Today, Costa Rica’s sixty thousand Jews (out of a total population of 5.5 million) form a highly-visible community, concentrated as it is in the area of San José de Costa Rica and retaining many of their pre-migration customs, including continued use of the German language.
VENEZUELA:
The half-million Jews of Venezuela, descendants of Polish and Ukrainian Ashkenazic and Greek Sephardic immigrants, are highly assimilated into Venezuelan society. Like Jews elsewhere in South America, Venezuelan Jews are united by a national Consistory after the French model, although the broad sectarian and ethnic diversity of Venezuela’s Jewish diaspora makes community life quite conflictual.
BRAZIL:
Three million Jews, descendants of a vast immigration of Jews from across Europe and the Mediterranean, make Brazil their home. Brazil, then, is home to almost as many Jews as live in Israel; Brazilian Jews consequently enjoy a very high profile in the international Jewish diaspora, much to the displeasure of smaller Jewish community in the Southern Hemisphere and elsewhere. A highly-urbanized population, concentrated in Brazil’s southern states–particularly in the São Paulo and Rio de Janerio metropolitan areas–Brazilian Jews maintain a lively community life on their own resources without extensive state support, including an excellent educational network extending to the university level and the independent União Nacional de los Judios Brasilianos. Anti-Semitism is low, despite occasional outbreaks in Brazil’s past.
URUGUAY:
Though only eighty thousand Uruguayans out of the country’s total population are Jewish, Uruguayan Jewish life is highly active. Uruguayan Jews are concentrated in the capital and largest city of Montevideo. Though they are highly assimilated, Uruguayan Jews maintain numerous links with the much larger Jewish community of Argentina, just across the Rio de la Plata. Assimilation is high, but anti-Semitism is quite low.
PARAGUAY:
Paraguay’s ten thousand Jews form a unique element of the Jewish diaspora. Depopulated by the War of the Triple Alliance of the 1860’s, Paraguay’s desperation for immigrants to recolonize its territory led it to sign a treaty with Poland in 1934 allowing for the immigration of several tens of thousands of Polish Jews to agricultural colonies in eastern Paraguay along the Paraná river. Though only eight thousand Jews arrived in Paraguay before the Second World War and many subsequently emigrated to Argentina, the Jewish agricultural colonies of eastern Paraguay are fascinating survivals of pre-Holocaust eastern European culture, and are some of the only places in the world outside of Israel where Yiddish is the dominant language.
ARGENTINA:
2.3 million Jews live in Argentina, three-quarters in Argentina’s metropolis of Buenos Aires. This vast Jewish community is the second-largest in the diaspora, and by far the largest in the Hispanophone world; yet, Argentine Jews are overshadowed by the larger Brazilian community. Argentine-Brazilian rivalries for leadership of the continent’s Jewish diaspora reflect the stereotypical insecurity of Argentina’s Jewish community, noted for a particularly strong work ethic. More so than in Brazil, Jewish culture is a major influence on wider Argentine culture; Jewish writers, musicians, artists, and even comedians have a very high profile in Buenos Aires and Argentina as a whole. Assimilation outside of Buenos Aires is high, but the porteño Jewish community is quite resistant to assimilation owing to sheer numbers and concentration.
CHILE:
Chile’s three hundred thousand Jews, concentrated in the cities of central Chile, have suffered more than their share of persecution over the 20th century. Despite Chile’s prosperity and its liberal-democratic constitution, well into the 1950’s anti-Semitism remained abnormally high, in large part because of the substantial political power of Chile’s very conservative Roman Catholic Church. The post-reconstrucion reaction of Chileans against the power of their national Church and the massive secularization of Chilean society has relieved much of this pressure, but anti-Semitism (and still more importantly, fear of anti-Semitism) remains an active force in Chilean society.
Written by Randy McDonald
June 6, 2004 at 12:26 am