(JTA) — A CNN poll of Europeans in seven countries found that more than a quarter believe Jews have too much influence in business and finance and more than one-third said they have no substantial knowledge of the Holocaust.
Yad Vashem, Israel’s state museum on the Holocaust, said in a statement Tuesday that it “is deeply concerned” about the data, primarily over how many Europeans claimed to know little or nothing about the genocide.
“Additionally, the survey highlights the troubling fact that many entrenched hateful anti-Semitic tropes persist in European civilization,” Yad Vashem wrote.
Only 5 percent of the 7,092 respondents reported never hearing about the Holocaust, but 29 percent said they had heard about the genocide and that this was the full extent of their knowledge about it. Half of respondents said they know “a fair amount” about the Holocaust.
One-third of respondents said that Jews use the Holocaust to advance their own positions or goals.
The poll, performed by ComRes on the subject of anti-Semitism, was performed in September in Britain, France, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Sweden and Austria, CNN reported.
The survey featured several questions on Jewish influence: Nearly one in four said Jews have too much in conflict and wars across the world, and one in five said they have too much in the media and in politics.
Forty percent of respondents said that Jews were at risk of racist violence in their countries and half said their governments should do more to fight anti-Semitism. But substantial minorities blamed Israel or Jews themselves for anti-Semitism.
To 28 percent of respondents, anti-Semitism in their countries mostly owed to Israel’s actions, they said. And 18 percent said the phenomenon was a response to the everyday behavior of Jewish people.
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