Over the last two months, there have been more than a dozen attacks on Jewish institutions across Europe. Two of the highest-profile attacks were in London, where two people were stabbed last month, in the same Jewish neighborhood where arsonists torched four Jewish-run ambulances in March. 

There have also been attacks in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Germany. 

Claiming responsibility for many of the incidents is a shadowy group calling itself Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiyya, which counterterrorism officials say may have ties to Iran.

But even if the attacks are part of an Iranian plot to destabilize the West, they seem to many of Europe’s Jews as just the latest chapter in a long and all-too-familiar story. Long before American Jews began to fortify their institutions, European synagogues resembled heavily guarded embassies in hostile countries. In France, which has seen some of the deadliest attacks on Europe’s Jews, Jews have been asking if they should stay or go for years. Many have left. 

That’s the context in which I interviewed Brandeis University historian Flora Cassen about her new book, “Stained Glass: A Reflective History of Antisemitism.” In an unusual combination of history and memoir, Cassen looks at Jewish life in today’s Western Europe through the lens of her academic specialty: medieval Jewry and antisemitism. 

Drawing on her own childhood in Belgium, she describes Jewish communities that are tight-knit but insecure, and constantly aware that their citizenship and prosperity don’t guarantee their acceptance or safety. Too often, she writes, governments and the media treat attacks on their Jewish communities as a front in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not as an attack on their own citizens. Meanwhile, a wave of Holocaust remembrance and atonement, she writes, is receding, replaced by a nationalist fervor to move on from a troubled past. 

It was during another wave of antisemitic attacks in Europe, in 2014 and 2015, that Cassen, by then living in the United States for over a decade, began asking if Jews had a future in Europe.

“Despite everything, I had always loved Europe,” she writes. “I wanted nothing else more than for Jews to count as true Europeans. The realization that I was possibly seeing the end of a community and that I was among those who had left was crushing.”

Cassen, 49, directs the Brandeis Center for Jewish Studies and its Sarnat Center for the Study of Anti-Jewishness. She is also a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute. 

On Tuesday, we talked about whether Jewish life in Europe has a future amid rising antisemitism, the unsettling  parallel she draws between Jewish life today and during the Middle Ages, and how Israel has shaped both antisemitism and Jewish identity in the Diaspora. She spoke to me from St. Louis, Missouri, where she joins her family when she isn’t teaching in the Boston area.

The interview was edited for length and clarity. 

Let me start with the genre of your book, because it’s a little unusual. It’s not a scholarly study; it’s not a history book; it’s part memoir. Each of the very short chapters is like a snapshot — of family history, of the history of European antisemitism, of your Jewish childhood in Antwerp and your last two decades or so in the United States. Is this the first time you’ve tried something outside of your usual lane?

It was the first time. And it took me a while to get there. I think I worked on this book for five years. I wrote my first book on the Jewish badge in Renaissance Italy, and that’s a very traditional scholarly monograph. And I’m proud of it. But then I realized I think I sold something like 200 books, which is normal for scholarly books.

So for this book, I wanted to do something different. A number of different things came together: the resurgence of antisemitism, first in Europe and in Belgium in a very visible way that was very troubling to me; my grandmother died in 2019; and then the pandemic started in the spring of 2020. 

Until last summer the book still had a very traditional structure. I had an introduction, six or seven chapters, each focused on a period of history, in which I inserted some personal stories or family stories. And then I did what was the boldest move for this book. I just separated it into something like 70 small chapters. And I was very worried. I sent it to my editor. I said, “I think I did something crazy,” but she loved it.

“There is a remarkable European Jewish history, and I am sad that it is ending,” said Flora Cassen, who’s new book is part history, part memoir. (Adam Kepecs)

One of the central dilemmas in your book is one that is very much in the air, with a wave of antisemitic attacks in Europe:  Should Jews stay, or should they go? It’s a question that has prompted reactions like the plays “Prayer for the French Republic” by Joshua Harmon and Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt.” Is there a future for Jewish life in........

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