Hunting Jews

Antisemitism, or more bluntly hatred of Jews and Judaism, takes many forms. We saw one on Oct. 7, 2023, when hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza slaughtered well over 1,000 Israelis.

We saw another form on Feb. 13, 2024, when the so-called European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that Belgium was entirely free to ban kosher slaughter.

The European Convention on Human Rights seemed like it might protect the Jews. The text of Article 9 (“Freedom of thought, conscience, and religion”) states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.” And Article 14 (“Prohibition of discrimination”) states that “The enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in this Convention shall be secured without discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status.”

Clear enough? Not for the Jews. In the case called Affaire Executief van de Moslims van België et Autres c. Belgique, the court found that kosher and halal slaughter can be banned because a country or provinces in it (the ban applies to Flanders and Wallonia, but not to Brussels) had legislated rules requiring stunning the animal before slaughter. Now, it’s true that Article 9—about religious freedom—reads like it would protect shechita, or kosher slaughter, and says nothing about animals. The court acknowledged that “Article 9 of the Convention did not contain an explicit reference to the protection of animal welfare in the exhaustive list of legitimate aims that might justify an interference with the freedom to manifest one’s religion.” Quite so. In fact Article 9 states that “Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.”

So how did the court torture that text into a meaning that did not protect the practice of Judaism? Simple—where there’s a will, there’s a way. “The Court considered that the protection of public morals, to which Article 9 of the Convention referred, could not be understood as being intended solely to protect human dignity in the sphere of inter-personal relations. The Convention was not indifferent to the living environment of individuals covered by its protection and in particular to animals, whose protection had already been considered by the Court. Accordingly, the Convention could not be interpreted as promoting the absolute upholding of the rights and freedoms it enshrined without regard to animal suffering.”

Gobbledygook eliminated, the animals trumped the Jews. And this, the court had to acknowledge, despite the fact that the provisions about freedom of religion are expansive—and do not even mention animal welfare. Let’s be clear: The court found that the practice of Judaism endangered “public morals.” This, on the continent where the very existence of Jews was not so long ago considered a threat to public morals. Nor is Belgium alone; kosher slaughter is also banned in Sweden, Iceland, Norway, and Slovenia. So far. The president of the European Jewish Congress, Ariel Muzicant, said after the February ruling that “We are already seeing attempts across Europe to follow this Belgian ban, now sadly legitimised by the ECHR.”

Now, this ruling would be bad enough taken on its own terms. But it cannot be. There is no country in Europe, not one, that bans hunting.

Think about that for a moment. Kosher slaughter, a critical element of Jewish observance and theoretically protected by the religious freedom clauses of the European Convention on Human Rights, cannot be tolerated. But in every single country in Europe forms of hunting are quite tolerable. Hunting—meaning, the shooting dead of animals who may die in pain and torment, is OK.

In 2021 the European Commission proposed banning hunting and fishing in “strictly protected areas” in Europe to promote biodiversity. No dice. The website of “Hunters of Europe,” in a posting titled “Move to ban hunting in 10% of the EU considered unjustified by Member States,” noted that “hunting will not interfere with the natural processes” of biodiversity loss and climate change.

Melanie Phillips wrote of a previous and similar court ruling that it sent “a devastating cultural signal. This is that the core principle of Western modernity, that minority groups can freely practice their religious precepts in a private sphere within which they pose no threat to the majority, has now been junked in Europe.”

As she noted, “The stag suffering painfully from a bullet wound, the mink dying of its injuries in a trap or the fox torn to pieces by a pack of hounds all meet a far more cruel death than does the animal slaughtered according to the rites of kashrut and halal.”

Phillips proposed a theory, that the “European strain of universalist Enlightenment thinking that forms the values of the European Union” contains a “vicious hatred of religion.” That anti-religious view had “given rise to the West’s predominant ideology of moral and cultural relativism, which has propelled the rise of paganism and the veneration of the animal and natural world at the expense of humanity. And that now has Jewish and Muslim religious practices squarely in its sights.”

I would not disagree with her view, but would add to it that accommodations meant to allow Jewish and Muslim life in Europe to flourish may be exactly what many Europeans do not want. Kowtowing to “animal rights” may reflect not only antisemitism, but as well Europe’s desire to deal with its rising Muslim population and the impact it’s having on European societies and cultures without saying so. Banning Jewish practice at the same time is a twofer: it is a way to appear more evenhanded, singling out neither Jews nor Muslims, and including Jews may be a way to avoid a Muslim backlash. For Muslims, whose population in Europe has grown so greatly in the last decades, there is little threat to survival. But for Jews in Europe, whose population has diminished so dramatically in the last 90 years, it is a far more serious blow.

As Muzicant, the president of the European Jewish Congress, put it, “Restrictions on fundamental aspects of Jewish religious freedom of expression, coupled with a background of massive increases in antisemitic attacks on Jewish communities, lead us to seriously consider whether Jews have a future in Europe.”

Rulings that elevate vague animal welfare notions over explicit protections of religious freedom, and that place the interests of animals over those of Jews under “public morals” standards, are bad enough. That this occurs in a continent where hunting remains legal everywhere really gives the game away. Not so long ago, hunting Jews was happening all over Europe. Today, hunting still seems to have greater protection than Jews do. As I noted at the start, antisemitism takes many forms.