IHRA-approved statement on antisemitism
The working definition of antisemitism, also called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism or IHRA definition, is a non-legally binding statement on what antisemitism is, that reads: "Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities." It was first published by European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) in 2005 and then by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in 2016. Accompanying the working definition, but of disputed status, are 11 illustrative examples whose purpose is described as guiding the IHRA in its work, seven of which relate to criticism of Israel.
The definition was developed during 2003–04 and first published on 28 January 2005 on the website of the European Union agency, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC). The publication was made "without formal review", and remained a working draft, until November 2013, when the EUMC's successor agency, the Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA), removed it from its website in "a clear-out of non-official documents". The working definition was adopted by the IHRA Plenary (consisting of representatives from 31 countries) in Bucharest, Romania, on 26 May 2016. It was subsequently accepted by the European Parliament and other national and international bodies and employed for internal use by a number of governmental and political institutions, although not all have explicitly included the illustrative examples. Pro-Israeli organizations have been advocates for the worldwide legal adoption of the IHRA definition.
The definition has been heavily criticised by academics, including legal scholars, who say that it is often used to weaponize antisemitism in order to stifle free speech relating to criticism of Israeli actions and policies. High-profile controversies took place in the United Kingdom in 2011 within the University and College Union, and within the Labour Party in 2018. The definition has been contested for weaknesses that critics say lend themselves to abuse, for obstructing campaigning for the rights of Palestinians, and for being too vague. Kenneth S. Stern, who contributed to the original draft, has opposed the weaponization of the definition on college campuses in ways that might suppress and limit free speech. The controversy over the definition led to the creation of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and the Nexus Document, both of which expressly draw distinctions between antisemitism and criticism of Israel.
Background.
European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia.
The Commission on Racism and Xenophobia (CRX) (also known as the Kahn Commission) was established in 1994. The CRX was transformed into the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) by Council Regulation (EC) No 1035/97 of 2 June 1997 and commenced in June 1998. Its mandate was to monitor different forms of racism and xenophobia.
In 2002, it published a large-scale monitoring report on Islamophobia since 9/11, including a total of 75 reports, 15 from each member state and a synthesis report. This was to be followed by a comparable report on antisemitism. A report entitled "Manifestations of antisemitism in the EU 2002–2003" was published in May 2004, along with a second report on perceptions of antisemitism based on interviews with European Jews. The antisemitism report was based on data collected by the 15 contact points of EUMC's monitoring network, RAXEN, then the robustness of the data evaluated by an independent researcher, Alexander Pollak. The report included a section on definitions, which concluded by proposing this definition:
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;Any acts or attitudes that are based on the perception of a social subject (individual, group, institution, or state) as "the ('deceitful', 'corrupt', 'conspiratorial', etc.) Jew".
The report also explored the question of when anti-Zionist or anti-Israel expression might be antisemitic (pp. 13–14), and highlighted the need to develop a common EU definition in order to collect and compare incidents across countries (pp. 25–29).
In December 2003, the Centre for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA) analyzed a pre-release version of the EUMC report. The ZfA report was leaked to the press and poorly received. According to civil rights lawyer Kenneth L. Marcus, in the report the primary cause of rising antisemitism in Europe was assigned to young Muslim males, while in a press release for the subsequent final publication the EUMC assigned the rise in antisemitism to "young, disaffected white Europeans". Marcus writes, the larger issue was missed that the definition of antisemitism that the EUMC used was based on "seven stereotypical traits: deceptiveness, strange-ness, hostility, greed, corruption, conspiratorial power, and deicidal murderousness". The EUMC report concluded that anti-Israeli and anti-Zionism expression could only be considered antisemitic if it was based on the stereotype of Israel as the collective Jew.
Following the EUMC report, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)'s Berlin Declaration recognised that post WW2 antisemitism had changed and was now at times directed against Jews as a collective and Israel as an embodiment of the Jew. The Berlin Declaration also tasked the OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) to work with the EUMC to develop better ways to monitor antisemitic incidents in OSCE countries. At the same time, according to Marcus, the EUMC, largely due to pressure from American Jewish organizations, scrapped its failed definition of antisemitism.
2004 Stern, Porat and Bauer version.
Israeli scholar Dina Porat, then head of the Stephen Roth Institute at Tel Aviv University, proposed the idea for a common definition during an NGO conference organized by the American Jewish Committee (AJC). Kenneth S. Stern of the AJC, a human rights lawyer, was critical of the EUMC's original definition, as it was confusing about when attacks on Jews related to the Israel/Palestine conflict could be considered antisemitic, and required investigators to know the intentions of attackers. Meanwhile, the EUMC asked "selected Jewish NGOs and academics to provide a simple working definition that would encompass antisemitic demonization of Israel, and which could also be used by their own RAXEN network of national focal points and by law enforcement agencies".
During 2003–04, involving the "efforts of a large number of institutes and individual experts", and coordinated by Stern, together with Dina Porat, Holocaust scholars Yehuda Bauer, Michael Berenbaum and Roni Stauber, the Community Security Trust's Michael Whine, human rights expert Felice D. Gaer, and others, a proposed definition and set of examples was drafted. The draft working definition identified that some criticism of Israel and of Zionism is antisemitic:
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;Antisemitism is hatred toward Jews because they are Jews and is directed toward the Jewish religion and Jews individually or collectively. More recently, antisemitism has been manifested in the demonization of the State of Israel.
Antisemitism frequently charges Jews with conspiring to harm humanity, and it is often used to blame Jews for "why things go wrong". It is expressed in speech, writing, visual forms and action, and employs sinister stereotypes and negative character traits. (It may also be manifested on people mistaken as Jews, or on non-Jews seen as sympathetic to Jews.)
This was then followed by a list of illustrative examples, including five examples of the ways in which antisemitism manifests itself with regard to the State of Israel. According to both Marcus and Antony Lerman, the novel element in the draft definition was identifying certain forms of criticism of Israel and Zionism as antisemitic, and Marcus also highlights the "praxeological" nature of the definition and its examples, i.e. its focus on pragmatic identification rather than scholarly understanding.
EUMC publication.
Initial publication.
At the suggestion of the AJC, the EUMC director organized a meeting of Jewish representatives to discuss the new definition of antisemitism which had been drafted; the consultation involved representatives of the AJC and European Jewish Congress, the EUMC director and head of research, and the ODIHR Tolerance and Non-Discrimination program director and antisemitism expert. The outcome was negotiated between Andrew Baker, Stern's colleague at the AJC, and Beate Winkler, director of the EUMC. According to Michael Whine of the Community Security Trust, "the Director of the ODIHR Tolerance and Non-Discrimination Division and the Advisor on Antisemitism played an active role in formulating the Working Definition."
On 28 January 2005, the EUMC published on its website a working definition of antisemitism which shared many features of Stern's earlier draft. Winkler published the definition "without formal review by her political overseers". Marcus writes that it was a "working definition" in two senses: a working guide to waidentifying antisemitism in practice, and a work-in-progress as opposed to a final statement to be approved by the EU's political leadership: "for this reason, formal endorsement was neither sought nor obtained".
The stated purpose of the definition was to "provide a guide for identifying incidents, collecting data and supporting the implementation and enforcement of legislation dealing with antisemitism", and the working definition stated: "Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities."
The definition included the concept of collective antisemitism. Several examples relate to animus towards Israel, including both Holocaust inversion and the application of double standards to Israel. The definition states that "However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic." The EUMC separated the working definition with eleven examples. This was presented as two separate groups, the first six examples were antisemitic tropes and the following five examples were introduced with the sentence: "Examples of the ways in which antisemitism manifests itself with regard to the state of Israel taking into account the overall context could include".
The EUMC working definition was prominently referenced by the OSCE Cordoba conference in June that year. According to Lerman, the definition was promoted by the AJC, other American Jewish organizations, national Jewish representative bodies, Jewish defence organizations, the Israeli government, pro-Israel advocacy groups, and was approved by the OSCE and other pan-European organizations. According to Lerman, the EUMC working definition was widely criticized and the organization was put under pressure by supporters and critics of the definition.
Use of the EUMC definition.
In 2008, the European Forum on Antisemitism commissioned translations of the Working Definition into each of the 33 languages used by the OSCE states.
In 2010, Stern wrote that "In the last five years, the definition has been increasingly used, because it provides a workable, non-ideological approach to task of identifying antisemitism." The definition was used by monitoring agencies and law enforcement officials in some European countries. According to Stern, by 2010, the definition had
 ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;been referenced or relied upon in or by courts (in Lithuanian and Germany), congressional hearings in the United States, online reference tools, newspapers, blogs, scholarly articles, legal articles, radio shows, student groups, museums, national inquiries of parliamentarians (most importantly in the UK), international meetings of parliamentarians, United States Department of State Reports, The United States Commission on Civil Rights, and in submissions to the United Nations Economic and Social Council Commission on Human Rights, Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights ... It continues to be referenced more and more because of its clear utility.
For example, in Lithuania, it was referred to in a successful criminal case against an editor of a right-wing newspaper in 2005.
The definition was used to some extent by some intergovernmental and EU agencies. For example, the OSCE used the definition in a 2005 report "Education on the Holocaust and Antisemitism: An Overview and Analysis of Educational Approaches". By 2010 it was recommended in the course leaders' Facilitators Guide in the OSCE OHDIR programme to assist law enforcement officials to understand and investigate hate crime, and at the 2010 OSCE High Level Conference on Tolerance and Non-Discrimination in Astana urged participating states to use and promote the Working Definition. In February 2009, the first conference of the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism, issued the London Declaration on Combating Antisemitism, calling to governments to expand the use of the Working Definition. The second annual conference, held in Ottawa, Canada, in association with the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism and the Canadian Government on November 7–9, 2010, issued the Ottawa Protocol, including a commitment to "reaffirm the EUMC – now Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) – working definition".
Canadian Members of Parliament adopted a resolution to combat antisemitism in 2007 that cited the EUMC definition, and the