Nearly half the world hates Jews – that is the stark message that emerges from the most comprehensive survey of global public opinion on the subject ever undertaken. Published on January 14, the results revealed that 46% of all adults in the world hold entrenched antisemitic views.
The poll, known as the Global 100 Survey, was conducted between July and November 2024 by the long-established Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in conjunction with Ipsos, the multinational market research firm, and others. More than 58,000 adults from 103 countries and territories were surveyed, representing 94% of the global adult population.
Launched in 2014, the Global 100 Survey has conducted only three such polls. The latest not only revealed the startling level of antisemitism across the globe. It also showed that the proportion of adults worldwide harboring antisemitic beliefs has rocketed from 26% in 2014 to 46% by 2024.
“Antisemitism is nothing short of a global emergency,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL’s chief executive.
“It’s clear that we need new government interventions, more education, additional safeguards on social media, and new security protocols to prevent antisemitic hate crimes…and now is the time to act.”
The results of the latest survey are not all bad news. Perhaps demonstrating that political and economic strength is respected, 87% of respondents do not want their country to boycott Israeli products and businesses, while more than seven in ten respondents believe their country should have diplomatic relations with Israel and would welcome Israeli tourists. Moreover, despite uncovering alarming antisemitic attitudes, the Global 100 data does show opportunities for progress, since 57% of respondents recognized – such are the inconsistencies of human nature –- that hatred toward Jews was a serious issue.
There are, however, few such crumbs of comfort among the findings. The poll tested reaction to 11 common negative tropes about Jews. Three-quarters of respondents in the Middle East and North Africa think most of them are true; the lowest levels of belief in the tropes were in the Americas and Western Europe.
The most extraordinary aspect of these findings are the basic mathematics. The total world population is some 8 billion, of whom about 4 billion, the Survey reveals, hold antisemitic views. But outside of Israel and the USA, there are only 2.3 million Jews scattered thinly across the rest of the globe. How many of the 4 billion poll-proved antisemites have ever seen a Jew? So what is the basis for all the animosity? How meaningful is it? Given the fickleness of public opinion, could, for example, the ceasefire in Gaza effect a massive swing in sentiment?
As for awareness of the Holocaust, sheer ignorance could account for the depressing findings. Some 20% of respondents knew nothing about it at all, while less than half of those questioned believed that the historical depiction of the Holocaust was true. While only 4% overall responded that “the Holocaust is a myth,“ 17% argued that the number of Jewish deaths was “greatly exaggerated by history.”
Clearly yet to make a global impact is the historical truth that a sophisticated Western European nation deliberately mobilized its industrial and military might and its bureaucracy to undertake the mass slaughter of a whole people. Six million men, women and children were massacred for no other reason than that they had been born.
Ignorance about Judaism, Jewish people and their story, linked to incoherent and groundless prejudice, is not a modern phenomenon. Jewish communities have been fighting it throughout their history. It was, for example, the antisemitism rampant in parts of early-twentieth century America that gave birth to the Anti-Defamation League which sponsors the Global 100 Survey.
Before the First World War some Jewish communities in America faced overt antisemitic discrimination. In 1913 Leo Frank, a Jewish-American businessman from New York, was the superintendent of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, Georgia. Mary Phagan was a 13-year-old employee. In April 1913 she was found murdered and sexually violated in the factory’s basement.
Largely on account of testimony from a janitor, Jim Conley, Frank became the prime suspect,. Giving evidence riddled with contradictions, Conley claimed that he helped Frank move the girl’s body.
Frank was arrested and, in a prejudiced atmosphere inflamed by sensationalist media coverage, was tried, convicted and sentenced to death. His legal team filed numerous appeals, including to the US Supreme Court, which upheld the verdict. But Georgia’s Governor John M Slaton had serious doubts about Frank’s guilt and, in 1915, commuted his sentence to life imprisonment.
His decision infuriated the public. The next day a mob calling itself the “Knights of Mary Phagan” stormed the prison in Milledgeville, Georgia, kidnapped Frank, transported him to Marietta, Mary Phagan’s hometown, and lynched him. This horrific event was attended by a crowd, including prominent local figures, and photographs of what happened were distributed as souvenirs.
The overt antisemitic bigotry and intolerance displayed during the trial of Leo Frank encouraged Chicago attorney Sigmund Livingston to suggest creating an organization whose mission would be “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people, and to secure justice and fair treatment to all…” He succeeded, but in the event ADL was founded on the clear premise that the fight against one form of prejudice cannot succeed without battling prejudice in all forms. Today ADL is a global leader in combating antisemitism, extremism and bigotry wherever it occurs.
Marina Rosenberg, the ADL’s senior vice president for international affairs, noted that even countries with lower antisemitic attitudes, like the UK, have seen “many antisemitic incidents perpetrated by an emboldened small, vocal and violent minority.”
Indeed, Britain’s Community Security Trust (CST) reported a 204% increase in antisemitic incidents from October 7, 2023, to September 30, 2024. Universities, hospitals and synagogues also recorded huge increases in religiously motivated criminal incidents, while ever since the Hamas pogrom large pro-Palestinian protest marches have taken place through central London every Saturday.
“Antisemitic tropes and beliefs are becoming alarmingly normalized across societies worldwide,” warned Rosenberg. “This dangerous trend…is a wake-up call for collective action.”
A parting thought. If nearly half the world is antisemitic, then more than half the world isn’t. That is a solid enough base on which to start the process of building knowledge and understanding of the long and often painful story of the Jewish people, and their survival against all the odds to return, finally, to their ancient homeland. Collective action against antisemitism must prioritize the message that Israel is here to stay.