A single day’s news in September 2016 might suffice. The front pages – like the rolling news channels – covered the fire-bombing of a mosque in Dresden. No longer an uncommon event, no one had been injured and the mosque building had not been badly damaged. Bad as it still is, this is the sort of story the media know how to deal with. It remains suggestive of the results of bigotry of any kind and anti-migrant bigotry in particular. Inside, and given far less coverage, are other now even more routine stories. There had been violent clashes in a small village between a gang of German bikers and a gang of migrants. The migrants had overwhelmed the biker gang before the police got there. Serious violence was narrowly averted.

Another story related events at an asylum centre the day before. On the evening of 27 September a migrant called police from a Berlin centre to say that he had seen another migrant abusing a child in some bushes. Three policemen arrived to find a 27-year-old Pakistani man still in some bushes where he was raping a six-year-old Iraqi girl. One of the policemen began to take the girl away as the two others handcuffed the Pakistani man and began to put him in the back of their police car. As they did so the abused girl’s father – a 29-year-old Iraqi – came running out of the asylum centre towards the car, holding a knife. The police shouted ‘stop’, but clearly intent on revenge he would not stop. The policemen shot the father dead. Articles covering this occurrence raised the bureaucratic questions of whether the police had acted appropriately.1 But none noted that these stories of lives irrevocably and haphazardly changed now constituted just another day in the new Germany.

Not that this new Germany was in a continent unrecognisable from the old. That same month of September, ahead of the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, a new survey of attitudes among European Jews was released. The work, carried out by two Jewish organisations, surveyed attitudes in Jewish communities from Britain to Ukraine. It found that despite increased security measures at synagogues across the continent, 70 per cent of European Jews said they would avoid attending synagogue. In 2016 fear of anti-Semitism and terror attacks would keep a majority of the continent’s Jews away from practising their faith.2