A new survey of global attitudes on subjects ranging from minorities to gender to terrorism makes grim reading. In Europe, malign sentiments towards Jews and Muslims are on the rise. In the Middle East and in the wider Muslim world - from Egypt to Turkey to Indonesia - opinions about Jews are overwhelmingly negative.

The Pew Research Center has issued a vast report and it is one that should be studied closely. The executive summary is here and the full report is here. For now, I’ll confine myself to some initial observations.

• Among a certain European demographic, there is a tendency to dislike both Muslims and Jews. As the executive summary says, “Older people and those with less education are more anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim than are younger people or those with more education.” And this, also, is significant: “There are some political parallels too. Anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish opinions are most prevalent among Europeans on the political right.” One can draw a potentially heartening conclusion from this: Muslims and Jews in Europe clearly have a common interest in confronting the bigotry and ignorance which feeds the far right.

• I have strong reservations about a methodology which classifies the groups targeted by bigotry solely as religious communities. As well as Jews and Muslims, the Pew report also looks at anti-Christian attitudes in Europe, noting that these are on the rise too. The danger here is that false equivalences are drawn. For example, in Spain, where a stunning 52 per cent of people have a negative view of Muslims and 46 per cent have a negative view of Jews, 24 per cent also report a negative view of Christians. Why this is the case - a critical component which the Pew report doesn’t explore - is what counts. Lumping together these sentiments into a basket labeled “religion” elides certain important nuances. Spain has a long political tradition of anti-clericalism, for example, which may partly explain the attitudes towards Christians (perhaps “the Church” is a more appropriate term), but is of limited use when it comes to anti-Jewish or anti-Muslim attitudes.

• Given the portrayal of anti-Jewish (and anti-Muslim) attitudes as the preserve of older and less-educated Europeans, what does that tell us about the phenomenon of elite antisemitism, much discussed on Z Word and on other sites? It tells us that educated people are less disposed to disliking Jews qua Jews. And even if they do dislike Jews, they aren’t going to confess as much to a researcher from Pew. It’s interesting to note that in the UK - where university academics have been seized by the debate about boycotting Israel and where anti-Zionist themes are common in media coverage and discussion of Israel - only 9 per cent of people say that their attitudes towards Jews are unfavorable (the figure for the US is 7 per cent). Does that mean we don’t have a problem? Not at all. It means that we have to resist a “one size fits all” approach when it comes to tackling antisemitism. What may be effective for an unemployed worker in Hamburg or Marseilles - who doesn’t spend any time thinking about Israel - may be utterly irrelevant for the journalist in London who spends an ordinate amount of time thinking about Israel. Meanwhile, when it comes to Europe’s Muslim communities, yet another approach may be needed.

• I was struck by the data which demonstrated that support for suicide bombing is in decline among Muslims, particularly those living in the Muslim world. This might be the consequence of some sort of moral reasoning - although it’s hard to square that with the reality that antisemitism remains rife - or it might flow from the realization that such terrorist methods have thusfar killed more Muslims than members of any other group. But it also could have something to do with the current debate among Islamist groups about the efficacy of suicide bombing.

• After the Second World War, at a time when antisemitism remained a potent factor in certain communist countries where only a tiny fraction of the Jewish population had survived the Holocaust, the term “antisemitism without Jews” was coined. The term is particularly apt now for the Arab and Muslim world, where there are no Jewish communities of any numerical significance, but where “unfavorable attitudes” toward Jews are upwards of 90 per cent in several cases. This, perhaps, represents the greatest challenge of all. Because while the case can be made that these attitudes have been exacerbated by the Middle East conflict, they rest upon a foundation which was laid well before Zionism arrived on the scene - and which could remain entrenched even after a peace settlement.