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From Martin Luther to modern-day blood libels, the country has never faced up to its fundamental anti-Semitism
The Jews are a base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth. The Jews are full of the devil's feces... which they wallow in like swine, their synagogue is an incorrigible whore and an evil slut.
-Martin Luther, "On the Jews and Their Lies," 1543
I KNOW what you are.
He smiled at me, the boy in the brown cargo pants, so sweetly that I was sure I had misheard him. But no. He knew what I was, even before I did, and he wanted me to know. The year was 1994,1 was in middle school in a small Swedish town, and my country was experiencing yet another surge in neo-Nazi activity. Maybe it was the economic crisis, maybe it was the weather. Or maybe it was the same forces that had conspired four decades ago to bring my mother to the front of her middle-school class so that her profile could be drawn next to the neighbor boy's-a lesson for her peers in how to tell a Jew from an Aryan.
"The Swedes are a practical people," my mother said of the incident. "It didn't feel like they were hateful. They just... wanted to know what we look like, you know, what features set us apart."
Why, though? Why did they want to know?
The answer to that question begins with Aaron Isaac, a seal engraver and haberdasher from Germany who arrived in Sweden in 1774 and became the first Jew to settle legally in the country without having to convert to Lutheranism. That was due to King Gustav III, who found the Jews to be an intelligent, industrious people and who thought that allowing entry to a few Jewish tradesmen would help a crumbling Swedish economy. The Swedish people were not as welcoming. Isaac wrote in his memoir that he lived in fear of attack for being a Christ-killer and noted that the forced baptism of Jews was common practice. What's more, he and his co-religionists were subjected to the juderegiemente, a law allowing Jews to settle in three selected Swedish...