The infamous Nazi slogan Die Juden sind unser Unglück - the Jews are our misfortune - was coined by the German historian Heinrich von Treitschke six decades before Kristallnacht. The ensuing Holocaust provided horrific, indelible proof that what begins with vile words often ends with murderous deeds, even deeds once considered unthinkable. So unthinkable, in fact, that it may have appeared, after Auschwitz, that anti-Semitism had been beheaded, rendered taboo, at long last discredited by its own hideous, extravagant success.

Yet it was too much to expect that anti-Semitism had been destroyed along with Hitler, or rendered irrelevant by the birth of the State of Israel. As the pre-Herzlian Zionist Leo Pinsker, a medical doctor from Odessa, diagnosed the problem in 1882, in his brilliant tract "Auto-Emancipation": "Judeophobia is a psychic aberration. As a psychic aberration, it is hereditary; as a disease transmitted for two thousand years, it is incurable." At best, anti-Semitism was in remission, under reasonable control, for half a century. It was as if the Third Reich, with Hitler's bunker at its core, had imploded into a giant rock, a sealed lid under which slithered the germs of anti-Semitism. Finally, with the so-called al-Aqsa intifada, the motley enemies of the Jewish people found an Archimedean lever with which the rock could be pried up and the ancient scourge of anti-Semitism unleashed, this time in a new and insidious mutation known as anti-Zionism.

The irony has been cruel and infuriating. The Jewish state, which had been conceived as the remedy for anti-Semitism, had become its pretext. Now it was the state of the Jews that had become the well-poisoner of the global village, that "shitty little country," in the intemperate words of the French ambassador to England, unaware that his hostess at a London dinner party was a Jewish journalist, without which the world would be better off. Other European luminaries have expressed similar or even more odious sentiments publicly: The Portuguese novelist José Saramago, winner of the Nobel Prize, declared that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was tantamount to Nazism, and that the Jews therefore no longer deserved sympathy for their suffering in the Holocaust. Just the other week, the immensely popular Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis chimed in that the Jews are the root of all evil. Small wonder, then, that a recent poll conducted by the European Union found that Israel, in the opinion of the rank-and-file residents of lands that in living memory had endured -- and often abetted -- the slaughter of most of their Jewish citizens, was the country that most threatened world peace.

In other words, Die Juden sind unser Unglück. It's the Jews, once again the Jews. Not the terrorists who brought the world 9-11 and other atrocities (they, the pollsters would argue, are not a "country") nor the regimes that sponsor them - Syria, Libya, Iran, Saudi Arabia - but Israel, the Jewish state. Is this outrageous double standard, this fixation on the foibles of a militant, beleaguered Israel while turning a blind or sympathetic eye to the murderous conduct of other peoples, Europe's way of shaking off its Holocaust guilt? The answer is probably yes. Is it a twisted expression of atonement - in France and Belgium in particular, but elsewhere too - for one's own sordid colonial past? Yes again. And is it expedient for the French, with ten times as many Muslims as Jews within their population, to rationalize, even excuse, the attacks on Jews and Jewish property by angry young hooligans from the North African underclass? Sure it is. Indeed a study of anti-Semitism by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, an arm of the European Union, was shelved because researchers had discovered that anti-Israel Muslims were responsible for many of the anti-Jewish hate crimes - in which case, apparently, those crimes don't really count.

It goes without saying that criticism, even harsh criticism, of Israel's policies is not the same thing as anti-Semitism. An editorial cartoonist who depicts Palestinians as fenced in by a Jewish star may claim, without being disingenuous, that he is using a symbol of a sovereign state; it is surely not his fault that Israel considers itself the home of the entire Jewish people and has appropriated religious symbols for its national flag, and he may justifiably take offense at being branded an anti-Semite. At the same time, anyone who doubts the glib and widespread conflation of Israel and "the Jew", the slippery slope between opposition to Israeli conduct and the demonization of the Jewish state and Jews themselves, need only recall the irruption of unabashed anti-Semitism at the United Nations Conference Against Racism in Durban in August 2001, where pro-Hitler posters were displayed on U.N. turf and thousands of allegedly progressive non-governmental organizations signed onto a document that singled out Israel as the world's premier perpetrator of racism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and even genocide.

But many people barely remember Durban, which was eclipsed within two weeks by the crumbling of the World Trade Center. Here, too, the story comes around to the Jews. Throughout the Muslim world, where the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and medieval blood libels are the stuff of TV mini-series, it is common knowledge that the Mossad was behind 9-11. The canard was echoed in a wild poetic tirade by Amiri Baraka, the sometime poet laureate of New Jersey, who was subsequently invited to speak by a student group at Yale (to be at once anti-Bush, anti-globalization, anti-Israel is de rigueur on many campuses, complicating the lives of a new generation of Jewish students.)

America and Israel are the Big and Little Satans for militant Islam, but a larger, more troubling question concerns the relationship between the two as perceived by the wider world. For the true-believing anti-Semite, in Malaysia or Montana, it is axiomatic that the Jews (and Israel, home base of the global conspiracy) control America. For the agnostic, it seems plausible that a cabal of American Jewish "Likudniks" duped George Bush into a costly war in Iraq. But what are we to make of the lingering suggestion that were it not for American support of Israel, the Twin Towers would be standing today?

Which brings us eastward to Istanbul, and back to Heinrich von Treitschke. Turkish Jew and Muslim Turk alike were savagely killed and maimed in the Sabbath bombings of the Neve Shalom and Beth Israel synagogues. But alongside the outrage and the empathy, was it not inevitable that some Turks drew a distinction between the Jewish victims and the "innocent" non-Jewish ones? And if British targets were attacked next, was this perhaps because of Tony Blair's Middle Eastern adventurism in the service of American and Israeli interests? If misfortune strikes because of the Jews, if they are a source of Unglück -- bad luck, a jinx, a magnet for hatred and violence - would it not be most prudent to ask them, encourage them, perhaps require them to leave? Could such a thing happen in Turkey? In France? Even, someday - as the Jews dwindle in numbers and American Muslims grow in influence, and the memory of the Shoah gets dimmer and its deniers become bolder-- in the United States?

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Such questions may have seemed idle, fatuous or paranoid a few years back, but no longer. The intertwining of rampant terrorism and resurgent anti-Semitism, brought again to the fore by the Istanbul synagogue bombings, raises the possibility that the enemies of the Jewish people, spearheaded by radical Islamists, are gradually and deliberately driving a wedge between Jews and the rest of mankind, playing upon fears and prejudices that, as Dr. Pinsker of Odessa well knew, go back to antiquity. Terrorist activity in Israel and the territories is designed, it seems clear, to perpetuate the image of the Jewish state as a brutal, repressive Goliath that responds to the slingshots of weak and desperate suicide bombers with tanks, attack helicopters, and deadly warplanes.

Pinsker had plausibly argued that only when Jews would cease to be merely the ubiquitous guests in other people's countries, and would possess a territory where they too would be hosts, would Jews everywhere be perceived as members of a normal nation, and not, as he put it, a "ghostlike apparition of a people." But instead of enhancing the prestige and security of Jews everywhere, Israel has been provoked into acting in ways that provide cheap fodder for anti-Semitic propaganda. Israelis have long prided themselves as the guardians of Jewish lives everywhere, a new breed of brave and steely Jews capable of rescuing hostages in Entebbe or assisting their Diaspora brethren in protecting synagogues, schools, and community centers. But now the ugly conflict in the Jewish homeland has bled overseas, as terrorists seek to convince fearful societies that their support for Israel, and even the presence of Jews in their midst, is a risk not worth taking.

Plus ça change, alas. The Roman historian Tacitus (ca. 56-120 CE), drawing on a Egyptian-Greek tradition diametrically opposed to the Jewish story of the Exodus, wrote that the Jews were expelled from Egypt into the desert because they were detested by the gods and had brought about a plague. "The Jews," in Tacitus' view, "are extremely loyal toward one another, and always ready to show compassion, but toward every other people they feel only hate and enmity." In early November, a poll published in the Corriere della Sera newspaper indicated that 17 per cent of the Italian public believed that all in all, it would be better if the State of Israel did not exist. According to the same poll, 22 percent opined that Jewish citizens are not "real Italians," and 51 percent said that Jews have a different "mentality" and way of life from other Italians.

On the one hand, these numbers are rather shocking, especially in light of the fact that Israel currently considers Italy to be its best friend in Europe, as evidenced during Prime Minister Sharon's recent trip to Rome. Yet one should also keep in mind that minorities are looked upon askance in every culture. It is safe to surmise that at least 22 per cent of the Jews in Israel do not consider Arab citizens of the state to be "real Israelis," and probably would not even if peace were suddenly to reign between Palestinians and Jews. Moreover, is it anti-Semitic per se to think that Jews have a different mentality or way of life? Has not a stubborn refusal to assimilate into other cultures been the guiding principle of Jewish survival for two millennia?

Neither the problem nor its possible solutions are as clear-cut as we might like. Following the recent arson at the Mercaz Hatorah school in suburban Paris, the chief rabbi of France, Joseph Sitruk, urged Jewish men to wear hats in public instead of yarmulkes. Speaking in Rome, Sharon declared that the remedy for anti-Semitism is aliyah. A worthy goal, of course, but also one that rings ironic, considering that Israel today is one of the least safe places for Jews to live. The Babylonian Talmud (Pesahim 87b) states that "the Holy One, Blessed be He, acted with kindness toward his people by scattering them among the nations," upon which the medieval commentator Rashi remarked: "So they could not all be wiped out together."

Rashi's ominous observation was given new resonance last month when Meir Dagan, head of the Mossad, told the Knesset's foreign affairs and defense committee that Iran's rapidly developing nuclear-weapons capability was the biggest threat to Israel's existence since the nation was founded in 1948. Along similar lines, at a meeting of an international forum convened last summer in Jerusalem by Likud Minister Natan Sharansky to discuss strategies for combating anti-Semitism, the renowned Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer stressed that the biggest danger to the Jewish people comes not from hostile media or leftist intellectuals, nor from the U.N. or the NGOs who bash Israel in the name of human rights, bur rather from radical, deviant Islam, whose totalitarian, genocidal ideology is reminiscent of Nazism and Communism, both of which were also fueled by anti-Semitism and which also began as minority movements that were not, at first, taken seriously enough.

Accordingly, it may turn out that the terrible bombings in Istanbul will have a positive effect, in that they underscore that the war against terrorism is also a war against anti-Semitism. Israel and the Jews need plenty of help, especially from moderate Muslim nations such as Turkey, with whom, even more than before, they now have common cause. For all the ill winds blowing on the campus and the Internet and the airwaves, and from the lips of neo-fascist German politicians, and in the fevered brain of filmmaker Mel Gibson - whose "The Passion of Christ," to be released in a few months, has already fanned the flames of inter-religious conflict -- there is a countervailing breeze of sobriety and responsibility abroad in the West, even in France. Following the school fire, President Jacques Chirac called an emergency meeting of government ministers and set up a cabinet-level committee to deal with anti-Semitism. In the wake of disclosures that it had funded anti-Jewish agitators at Durban, the Ford Foundation pledged to prevent further grants to such groups. Meeting in Brussels in December, EU leaders officially voiced strong condemnation of "all manifestations of anti-Semitism."

It is not inconceivable that one of these days, the United Nations will vote on a resolution condemning anti-Semitism. Presumably Arab delegates will insist that they are Semites too and that Israel is guilty of anti-Semitism in its treatment of the Palestinians. Sponsors of such a resolution might be well advised, in the name of clarity, to stick with Pinsker's term, "Judeophobia." For its part, the State of Israel, to preserve its historic role as protector of the Jewish people, ought simultaneously to lead the diplomatic fight against global anti-Semitism and, at the same time, to muster all its mental capital and moral fiber to deprive anti-Semites of raw material for their campaigns of hate. It is sadly true that if Israel were to tear down every roadblock tomorrow, and evict every Jewish settler from the West Bank and Gaza, the Jews would still be accused of controlling the banks and the media and the White House, and the foes of Israel would still be working overtime to undermine its legitimacy and eventually eliminate it. But if, as Pinsker concluded, anti-Semitism cannot be cured, it can, like any chronic disease, be wisely and cleverly treated.