Global Levels, Trends, and Correlates of Antisemitic Attitudes Through the Prism of Modernization Theory: Insights from the Pew Research Center and World Values Surveys

Today, the most fundamental understanding of what stands behind the differences in the volume of antisemitic attitudes between different countries is limited; the understanding of how antisemitic attitudes are related to other types of attitudes is unsatisfactory and the awareness of the trajectories of change in quantitative indices of antisemitic attitudes is rudimentary. This article is an attempt to fill these gaps. The principal objective is to map and explain the unfavorable attitudes to Jews on a global scale. Mapping of the unfavorable attitudes to Jews is now possible both cross-sectionally and longitudinally, and it is carried out on the basis of the surveys of global attitudes conducted by Pew Research Center. An explanation of the observed patterns of attitudes to Jews is proposed with reference to the existing research on the global evolution of social and political attitudes, embodied by the modernization theory of Inglehart and Welzel. The findings have some implications for some scholarly debates regarding the place of antisemitic attitudes in the big picture of human history and for policy initiatives to combat antisemitism. Keywords: antisemitism statistics, attitudes, modernization theory, Pew Research Center, World Values Surveys