“Good morning darling,” said the anonymous phone caller to the administrator at my local synagogue last week. “I just wanted to know how much you charge for the kids’ blood that you drink, I wanted to place an order.”

It’s the blood libel revived: a medieval anti-Jewish myth invented almost 900 years ago, reheated for 2024 – in the cauldron of emotions kept boiling away by conflict in Israel and Palestine. I’d call this unusual, except it is a lot less unusual than it used to be. Anti-Jewish hate crime skyrocketed after the Hamas attack on Israel last year and still hasn’t returned to what we used to consider “normal”. There have been almost as many antisemitic incidents in the year since 7 October 2023 as there were in the whole of 2020, 2021 and 2022 combined, according to figures from the Community Security Trust.

It’s complacent to assume Israel’s war against Hamas causes this. Antisemites have always found ways to justify their contempt for Jews: either by referring to bad things some Jews have done, inventing things they haven’t done, or blaming them for things other people do. Right now, it feels like all three are in play. The Marxist theorist Norman Geras called this “alibi antisemitism”, and nothing provides a greater alibi than Israel. That this fresh surge in visceral hatred began on 7 October itself, while Hamas gunmen were still raping festival-goers and burning kibbutz families in their homes, says everything.

However, to focus only on antisemitism that can be seen and measured misses the point, not least because most Jewish people still go about their daily lives without problems. Deeper scars are being inflicted across the community by a shift that........

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