A few weeks ago, I walked into a second-hand bookstore and bought a novel by Antonio Tabucchi, the Italian writer whose devotion to Fernando Pessoa and Lisbon had recently drawn me into his work. Only later did I open the first page and notice a dedication, written by Tabucchi himself, dated 1998 and signed in Tel Aviv. He had given the book to the library of the Italian Cultural Institute there. Somehow, over nearly three decades, it had left the library and traveled through other shelves before reaching mine.

Tabucchi would probably have appreciated the coincidence. His fiction is filled with displaced objects and people who discover that history has been waiting quietly for them. He understood that one learns a great deal about a society by watching whom it places at the center and whom it moves toward the margins. His migrants, Roma, and political exiles are never simply figures in a landscape. They reveal who belongs, who must explain their presence, and who is quietly moved outside the story a nation tells about itself.

That question of who belongs at the center and who is moved toward the margins is worth asking about Europe and its Jews.

In the decades after World War II, Europe symbolically relocated its Jews. The people who had been expelled, stripped of citizenship, and murdered were placed at the moral center of the postwar European order. Jewish memory became European memory. Auschwitz became a negative foundation for European identity, and antisemitism became a warning sign of democratic collapse. Synagogues were restored, memorials built, and schoolchildren sent to visit camps. This transformation was real. The European Union........

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