David Stavrou
Haaretz, Feb. 3, 2024
“We always had antisemitism, but you could avoid it by moving to a different neighborhood or changing your job. Now it’s everywhere – in the streets and squares, even in the ‘nice’ neighborhoods.”
Sweden’s Jewish community is preparing to celebrate its 250th anniversary next year, but what was being heralded as an unprecedentedly good moment for the community changed in the blink of an eye on Oct. 7.
This is a story about both ancient and modern history, and how a country went from having no Jews to having a vibrant Jewish community – yet could still end up having very few local Jewish communities if the recent tensions continue.
Prior to 1774, there was no Jewish community in Sweden. Although some Jews had settled there earlier, there was no Jewish community as Jews who immigrated there had to be baptized into the Lutheran religion.
That all changed 250 years ago, though, when a Jewish seal engraver named Aaron Isaac arrived in Stockholm from German Mecklenburg. “Isaac became the first person who was allowed to live as a Jew in Sweden,” says Daniel Leviathan, a Swedish-Jewish historian who’s also active in some of the country’s Jewish organizations. “He was able to secure the right to form a minyan [prayer group] and to found a Jewish cemetery and mikveh.”
Within the space of a year, Stockholm had a proper Jewish community, which included new arrivals from Germany, Denmark and Holland. Around the same period, under King Gustav III, a second Jewish community was established in Sweden’s second largest city, Gothenburg.
“In 1782, a Jewish ordinance was issued as a demand of the Swedish aristocracy,” Leviathan recounts. Apart from regulating the right for Jews to live in Sweden, the ordinance set some restrictions. Jews were only allowed to move to the country if they had a minimum capital worth today’s equivalent of about $100,000; they had to live in one of three towns; and local guilds stopped them from working in certain fields.
“At the beginning of the 19th century,” he says, “there were only about 1,000 Jews living in Sweden. Many of them were young and industrious people who thought they could make a better life for themselves in Sweden. At this point, they couldn’t yet assimilate into Swedish society, and since it was a small community they all knew each other. They competed with each other but were also dependent on each other.”
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