Antisemitic Attitudes and Anti-Jewish Crime in the United Kingdom: Longitudinal Trends, Demographic Predictors, and Policy Implications
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Abstract
Recent terror attacks against Jewish targets in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the diaspora have been motivated by hostility to Israel and (for the most part) carried out by Muslim members of migrant communities, often with links to Islamist organizations. In this, such attacks follow trends in anti-Jewish incidents more broadly. An explanation for this pattern may be found in evidence (a) that antisemitic attitudes are low in the United Kingdom and culturally similar countries, but much higher in parts of the Muslim world from which large numbers have migrated to the United Kingdom, and (b) that extremists exploit the Israel-Hamas conflict in order to radicalize Muslims in particular.This article presents two empirical studies. The first, which aggregates official UK po-lice statistics for the eight-year period ending March 2025, finds absolute numbers of religiously aggravated crimes targeting perceived Jews to have roughly tripled, appearing to track developments in the Israel-Hamas conflict (notably doubling after October 7, 2023). The second, which analyzes attitudinal data collected from the general British pop-ulation between December 2020 and September 2025 (n = 11394), finds proportions of individuals with elevated levels of “old” (Judeophobic) and “new” (antizionist) antisemitic attitudes to be almost perfectly correlated from one year to the next, roughly doubling after the Hamas-led atrocities of October 7, 2023, with this rise having occurred disproportion-ately among the young (especially with regard to “old” antisemitic attitudes, which barely changed among individuals of median age and above). Multiple demographic predictors are identified with regard to “old” and “new” antisemitic attitudes, identity as Muslim emerging as by far the strongest in respect of both. Christians of all denominations are found to be particularly unlikely to hold elevated levels of antisemitic attitudes in relation to Israel and its supporters, while Christians of mainstream denominations are found to be no more nor less susceptible to elevated levels of classic antisemitic belief than people of no religion (although Christians of small minority denominations were found to be more likely to hold such attitudes). These findings have
Topics
Antisemitism: Attitude Surveys Antisemitism: Muslim Antisemitism: Incident Monitoring Main Topic: Antisemitism Terrorism Hate Crime
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Geographic Coverage
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Creative Commons CC BY NC
Volume/Issue
9(1)
Page Number / Article Number
1-42
DOI
Bibliographic Information
Antisemitic Attitudes and Anti-Jewish Crime in the United Kingdom: Longitudinal Trends, Demographic Predictors, and Policy Implications. 2026: 1-42. https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.26613/jca/9.1.201
