26 Percent of World’s Adults Are Anti-Semitic, Survey Finds
By RICK GLADSTONE MAY 13, 2014
Twenty-six percent of all adults worldwide harbor anti-Semitic attitudes and nearly half have never heard of the Holocaust, the Anti-Defamation League said Tuesday in what it described as an unprecedented and sobering global survey that assessed the level and intensity of hostility toward Jews.
Most and Least Anti-Semitic Places
These countries and territories have the highest and lowest percentages of adults harboring anti-Semitic attitudes, according to a global survey by the Anti-Defamation League.
MOST ANTI-SEMITIC
West Bank and Gaza
93percent
Iraq
92
Yemen
88
Algeria
87
Libya
87
Tunisia
86
LEAST ANTI-SEMITIC
Laos
0.2percent
Philippines
3
Sweden
4
Netherlands
5
Vietnam
6
“For the first time we have a real sense of how pervasive and persistent anti-Semitism is today around the world,” Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said about the survey. It was conducted against a backdrop of recurring anti-Semitic incidents and rhetoric that had never been systematically quantified in such a broad way.
The highest concentration of anti-Semitic attitudes was found in the Middle East and North Africa, the survey showed, led by the West Bank and Gaza, where 93 percent of respondents held such views, followed by Iraq at 92 percent, Yemen at 88 percent and Algeria at 87 percent. The areas where anti-Semitic attitudes were least prevalent were Oceania, the Americas and Asia. In Laos, less than 1 percent of the population held such views, the lowest anywhere, the survey said.
In Europe, the survey showed Greece to be the most anti-Semitic country, at 69 percent, and Sweden the least, at 4 percent. In the United States, the survey found 9 percent of respondents anti-Semitic.
Mr. Foxman said that the survey had enabled the League to “identify hot spots, as well as countries and regions of the world where hatred of Jews is essentially nonexistent.”
While the Middle East results were not particularly surprising, the Anti-Defamation League said that the overall result — more than one in four adults are anti-Semitic — was a major finding. The survey also found that only 54 percent of respondents had heard of the Holocaust, which Mr. Foxman called “a disturbingly low number.”
The results were based on responses to 11 negative statements that the Anti-Defamation League described as stereotypes about Jews.
The most widely held stereotype, the survey showed, was an affirmative answer to this statement: “Jews are more loyal to Israel than to this country/the countries they live in.”
Conducted between July 2013 and February, the survey was based on responses from 53,100 adults in 102 countries and territories in seven major regions, accounting for 88 percent of the world’s adult population. The League said the margin of sampling error for most countries, with 500 respondents each, was plus or minus four percentage points. In larger countries, with 1,000 respondents each, the margin of sampling error was plus or minus three percentage points.