Communities’ mutual fear and mistrust actively reshape their everyday social participation.

Evidence

We argue that these experiences, combined with exposure to wider anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim discourses, produce mistrust that, to build on John Jackson’s insight, ‘translate fear into social action’, such as when Jewish parents prevent their children from participating in an inter-faith event out of fear that they will become victims of a terrorist attack, or when young Muslims refuse to engage in dialogue with their Jewish counterparts out of fear that they will be accused of making anti-Israeli statements and arrested. The example of Jewish–Muslim relations in the UK could be usefully referred to in exploring Jewish–Muslim relations in the Diaspora worldwide, as we expect the local conditions to be an important factor of these relations in many parts of the world. To go beyond the context of Jewish–Muslim relations, our case study highlights how the expectations and social fears that different communities have about the way they will be treated by others are an important indicator of the overall state of inter-communal relations in the UK and the level of socio-political comfort that they experience not just in relation to each other, but also in relation to the mainstream society. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1769