There is a sentence you will never hear spoken aloud in any foreign ministry, any chancellery, or any presidential press briefing. It is nonetheless the operative principle governing the relationship between the Jewish people and virtually every other nation on earth. The sentence is this: We support Jewish survival — when it doesn’t cost us anything.

Everything else is commentary.

The European Record: Toleration as the Exception

Let us begin with the continent that produced both the Enlightenment and the Final Solution, often within the same century.

For more than a thousand years, the default European posture toward Jews has not been hostility punctuated by tolerance. It has been exclusion punctuated by brief intervals of toleration — and those intervals, almost without exception, were granted for reasons of economic utility, political convenience, or tactical necessity, not moral principle.

The Jews of medieval Europe were expelled from England in 1290, from France repeatedly across the 13th and 14th centuries, from Spain in 1492, and from Portugal shortly thereafter. When they were permitted to remain — in certain Italian city-states, in parts of the Ottoman-adjacent Balkans, in the early Dutch Republic — it was typically because they filled a useful commercial niche that Christian law and custom forbade Christians from occupying. They were tolerated as instruments. They were never embraced as equals.

The Enlightenment appeared to change this calculus. Emancipation spread. Jews were admitted to universities, parliaments, professional guilds. And yet the 19th century also produced modern racial antisemitism — the transformation of a religious prejudice into a biological one — precisely because legal equality had failed to dissolve the social hostility underneath it. Europe extended its hand and kept a knife behind its back.

The 20th century resolved the ambiguity. Six million Jews were murdered in the heart of civilized Europe, with broad popular participation and near-universal indifference from the surrounding populations and governments. The nations of the world, informed in real time of what was occurring, chose — with the rarest of exceptions — not to intervene, not to bomb the rail lines, not to open their borders. Jewish........

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