Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

318 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 4:315
dation to their Nazi overlords. Though all three industrial areas have been
forced to acknowledge their own complicity and have made numerous
attempts to downplay and limit those involvements, when all is said and
done, the picture Gerstenfeld paints is one of overriding tragedy for those
who survived and their descendants, and a token pittance (upwards of only
$250,000,000 guilders), which dishonors both those who did not survive
and the past and present Dutch governments and their participating institutions
as well. Given all the denials and attempts at obfuscation, political
manipulations, and other excuses, Gerstenfeld is forced to conclude that
“what was achieved by the Central Jewish Council can be considered reasonable
under the circumstances even if far from optimal” (188)—much to
his own sadness, and ours as well.
Turning next to his edited text, Behind the Humanitarian Mask: The
Nordic Countries, Israel, and the Jews, Gerstenfeld takes great pains to
remind his readers that the Jewish communities in Nordic countries are very
small, numbering altogether about 25,000. The largest community is in
Sweden, with an estimated 15,000 Jews. There are about 7,400 Jews in
Denmark, 1,300 Jews in Norway, and 1,200 Jews in Finland. Iceland has a
few Jewish inhabitants. but no organized Jewish community. 7
After a long essay by Gerstenfeld (18-77), what follows are a series of
essays and interviews focusing specially on the countries under his microscope
by a variety of distinguished colleagues—historians, professors, journalists,
ambassadors, parliamentarians, NGO executives: four on Sweden,
four on Norway, two on Denmark, two on Finland, and one on Iceland.
While not major players on the world’s political stage—with the possible
exception of the international hue and cry and responses over the case of the
Danish anti-Muslim/anti-Islamic satirical cartoons in 2005 8 —the pictures
painted are uniformly bleak and depressing; “the projection of anti-Israel
sentiments onto Jewish communities is a widespread pattern throughout
Europe” (15). Such an assessment must, therefore, be coupled with the
understanding that “anti-Semitism is a deep-rooted, integral part of European
culture and has been promoted systematically and intensely over many
centuries, initially by large parts of Christianity and since the nineteenth
century by nationalist movements” (19).
In addition, specific examples abound throughout this text that further
reveal the increasing vulnerabilities of Nordic Jewish communities and the
refusal of their governments to acknowledge their own complicities in the
7. Manfred Gerstenfeld, ed., Behind the Humanitarian Mask, 30.
8. See Jytte Klausen, The Cartoons that Shook the World (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2009).