Study: Europe’s Jews are pro-EU and less attached to their home countries

Europe’s Jews may feel less attached to their home countries than the countries’ general populations feel but are still more inclined towards where they live than other minorities, a fascinating new report reveals.

Published on Tuesday by the London-based Institute of Jewish Policy Research (JPR), analysts explored the data behind the antisemitic trope that Jews do not truly ‘belong’, or that they have ‘divided loyalties’ between their home countries and Israel, and found a divergent picture.

Across the continent, researchers said “a lower proportion of Jews feel ‘very strongly attached’ to their home countries than the general population, but a higher proportion of Jews feel ‘very strongly attached’ to the EU”.

Respondents’ answers, taken from more than 16,300 Jews in 12 EU Member States over several years, show that views differ greatly from country-to-country, with researchers also testing European Jews’ attachment to the European project.

In some cases, there is a greater attachment to Israel. In other cases, Jews feel far more inclined towards where they live. Danish and Polish Jews, for instance, feel almost twice as much attachment to Denmark and Poland than they do to Israel, whereas Jews in Germany feel almost twice as attached to the Jewish state.

Jews’ attachment levels towards the EU are higher in all 12 states than it is among the total populations, which the researchers said made Jews “stand out”.

This pro-EU stance was “particularly strong” in central and eastern European states such as Hungary and Austria, but in much of Western Europe and Scandinavia, differences between Jews and others are negligible.

In northern, central, and eastern Europe, including Germany, the gap attachment gap between Jews and non-Jews is larger, while in some western and southern European states it is much smaller, suggesting a far closer alignment.

In the UK, 42 percent of Jews felt “very strongly attached” to Blighty, compared to 54 percent of the total population that felt the same. On the EU, the difference was much smaller, with 14 percent feeling “very strongly attached” to Brussels, compared to only 12 percent of Brits who echoed the sentiment.

Interestingly, the strongest levels of attachment to Israel came from the more religiously observant European Jews, but these same groups showed relatively weak levels of attachment to the EU.

Answering sensitive questions around Jewish attachment and loyalty “helps us to see how integrated European Jews feel today, and bring some empiricism to the antisemitic claim that Jews don’t fully belong,” said JPR.

“Of course, it is not only Jews who face this type of accusation. As Europe and the West diversify through immigration, it is a common trope heard against multiple minorities.”