Antisemitic incidents in Germany have risen sharply since October 7, 2023, intensifying pressure on courts, public authorities, employers, and universities to determine where democratic contestation ends and unlawful discrimination begins. While many of these incidents never reach legal thresholds, courts are repeatedly called upon to decide whether contested speech, conduct, or affiliation constitutes legally relevant antisemitism. These decisions must be rendered in binary terms—lawful or unlawful, permissible or sanctionable—even when social meaning, political symbolism, and intent remain deeply contested.

The difficulty is not a lack of normative commitment. There is broad political consensus in Germany that antisemitism—including its Israel-related forms—must be opposed. However, the very effort to distinguish legitimate political critique of Israel from Israel-related antisemitism remains deeply controversial. This tension exposes a deeper problem: contemporary antisemitism does not map neatly onto legal categories designed to regulate speech, loyalty, or public order.

Courts therefore often encounter antisemitism indirectly, addressing it through adjacent legal concepts such as proportionality, neutrality, constitutional loyalty, or public security—concepts that were not developed with antisemitism as their primary object.

This post examines how German courts navigate this tension by analyzing three recent cases drawn from different areas of law: labor law, citizenship law, and civil service law. The cases are taken from the Seeing Antisemitism Through Law (SATL) database, a comparative research project that examines how antisemitism appears—or fails to appear—in legal practice. Based on a newly developed database of more than 1,000 cases since 1945, the project enables individual judgments to be read not as isolated controversies, but as sites where broader legal and political pressures converge.

The analysis proceeds with methodological caution. Three cases cannot support general claims about judicial behavior, nor can they establish causal hierarchies among protected groups. What they can do is illuminate how antisemitism is juridified—or displaced—across different doctrinal fields, and how legal outcomes vary depending on institutional context, the legal status of the speaker, and the normative vocabulary available to the court.

Taken together, the three cases support a central hypothesis: contemporary German courts do not address antisemitism through a coherent or unified legal grammar, but through shifting doctrinal proxies—proportionality, neutrality, loyalty, and Staatsräson—whose application depends less on the content of the antisemitic expression than on the legal field and institutional position in which it appears. This produces not only doctrinal instability but a deeper structural asymmetry: the perspectives and experiences of Jews are seldom the decisive legal reference point. Instead, antisemitism is mediated through concepts oriented toward the rights, duties, and status of the non-Jewish (but also non-Muslim) majority, whose position continues to function as the baseline of German legal reasoning. In effect, German constitutional doctrine presupposes Christian-secular norms as standard—a form of secularism that is itself historically shaped by Christian theology—thereby rendering Jews, Muslims, and other minorities legally legible primarily as exceptions. The result is an approach that regulates antisemitism without placing Jewish experience at its centre, revealing both the reach and the limits of law in a moment of acute political and social polarization.

Between Weimar and Today: Seeing the Ambivalences of Antisemitism Through Law

Grey-zone tensions that unsettle strict legal binaries are not new, nor is their entanglement with antisemitism. The unstable boundary between legal reasoning and political power was already visible in the Weimar Republic, where constitutional debate between Hans Kelsen, Herman Heller and Carl Schmitt unfolded against a backdrop of political crisis and coded antisemitism—most explicitly in Schmitt’s attacks on “the Jew Kelsen.” The episode shows that legal theory was never purely doctrinal; it was shaped by identity, context, and political projection.

Contemporary debates in which “the Zionist” or “the authoritarian Jew” is cast as fascist echo these older patterns in altered form. The problem is not the critical identification of authoritarian or fascist tendencies where they exist—including among Jews or within Zionist movements—but the symbolic exceptionalization of Jews and Zionists as a distinct category of fascism, singled out from comparable ethnonationalist or authoritarian movements elsewhere. This move displaces historical responsibility by projecting fascism onto one of Germany’s oldest minorities, while leaving structurally analogous forms of authoritarianism less scrutinized. At the same time, Muslims and Arabs are drawn ambivalently into these dynamics: depending on context, they appear either as those who endanger Jews or as those needing protection from newly imagined “Jewish fascists.” This backdrop helps explain why contemporary antisemitism often exceeds legal categories, and why courts—rather than theory alone—have become key sites where these ambivalences are negotiated. Or as Oliver Wendell Holmes expressed in 1881: “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.”

Three Cases: What Can We See About Antisemitism Through German Law?

The following three cases illustrate how allegations of antisemitism are processed across different doctrinal fields of German law. Rather than offering a comprehensive account, each case brings a specific legal tension into view—between proportionality and public outrage, political commitment and legal obligation, and private expression and constitutional loyalty—thereby showing how antisemitism is variously named, deferred, or displaced in judicial reasoning.

The El Ghazi Judgment: Loyalty, Proportionality, and Employer Neutrality

On 12 November 2025, the Landesarbeitsgericht Rheinland-Pfalz rejected the appeal lodged by 1. FSV Mainz 05, thereby confirming Arbeitsgericht Mainz’s June 2024 judgment in favor of Anwar El Ghazi. The club had terminated El Ghazi’s contract after he shared a series of pro-Palestinian Instagram posts following the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, including the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Mainz 05 argued that the posts breached duties of loyalty and reproduced antisemitic tropes. The labor courts, however, drew a sharp distinction between public controversy and the legal thresholds for dismissal. Relying on the principle of employer neutrality (Arbeitgeberneutralität), the Landesarbeitsgericht emphasized that an employer may not terminate an employment relationship merely because an employee’s political expression conflicts with the institution’s publicly declared values.

Two aspects of the case are particularly noteworthy. First, with regard to the slogan “From the river to the sea,” the court did not treat its use as such as sufficient grounds for dismissal. Nor did it construe a subsequent social-media post by the employee as a reaffirmation of the slogan. The judgment ultimately turned less on a substantive assessment of the phrase itself than on principles of proportionality. Even assuming that the employer had legitimate concerns, the court held that a warning would have constituted the milder and therefore legally required response; immediate termination was deemed disproportionate (unverhältnismäßig).

It is worth noting that other German courts have addressed the same slogan in different legal constellations and have reached differing assessments depending on context. In August 2024, for example, the Berlin Tiergarten District Court convicted and fined an activist for chanting it, holding that in that context it denied Israel’s right to exist. Shortly thereafter, the Düsseldorf Administrative Court upheld police bans on its use at demonstrations as precautionary security measures. the Duisburg Regional Court acquitted a defendant in May 2025. Considered in the aggregate, these rulings do not suggest a single, uniform legal classification of the slogan, but rather underscore that its legal relevance under German law is highly context-dependent—shaped by intent, setting, and the specific institutional or regulatory framework at issue.

Second, the court rejected institutional value commitments as legally determinative: the club’s adoption of the IHRA working definition of antisemitism—including its illustrative examples regarding Israel—could not substitute for the statutory requirements of § 626 BGB. Public outrage likewise failed to supply the missing threshold: “substantial public criticism,” the court held, does not in itself constitute an important reason for dismissal. The case thus exemplifies the tension between the moral and political vocabularies through which antisemitism is publicly debated and the doctrinal constraints under which courts operate. While institutions may commit themselves to broader normative frameworks, labor law remains anchored in proportionality, intent, and narrowly defined legal thresholds.

Asymmetrical Scrutiny: Regensburg and the Legalization of Loyalty

In VG Regensburg (RO 9 K 24.782), the Bavarian Administrative Court upheld the denial of naturalisation to an applicant who refused to acknowledge Israel’s existence (“Es gibt kein Israel. Es gibt Juden, aber Israel nicht als Land”). The court found this position incompatible with Germany’s “special historical responsibility” toward Israel, now referenced in the reformed Nationality Act.

What makes the ruling notable is the way it operationalises Staatsräson. Staatsräson is a political doctrine—historically rooted in Cold War diplomacy, later elevated symbolically in Merkel’s 2008 Knesset speech—that expresses a state commitment to Israel, but it does not rest on a settled constitutional foundation. Anti-discrimination norms, by contrast, derive from enforceable constitutional and supranational guarantees. As Christoph Schuch argues, the Basic Law contains an indirect yet robust constitutional repudiation of antisemitism, one that extends to Israel-related forms where these impair the dignity or equal civic standing of Jews in Germany. Put differently, anti-antisemitism has a stable constitutional home: it is grounded in rights of dignity and equality that indirectly but effectively prohibit antisemitic discrimination, even if their precise scope remains contested. Staatsräson may complement this structure, but it remains a political commitment whose legal implications are—and likely must remain—intrinsically ambiguous.

While Staatsräson as a moral-political doctrine and anti-discrimination as a constitutional duty are not, in principle, incompatible, their reconciliation in practice often produces a dynamic that pits minorities against one another, redirecting political conflict away from the state and toward inter-minority competition, a dynamic that ultimately serves to stabilise the liberal order. The Regensburg judgment highlights this tension. The applicant was not denied citizenship for antisemitic conduct; rather, his political view was treated as incompatible with the state’s asserted responsibility toward Israel. This risks turning naturalisation into a test of ideological affirmation, where the criteria are politically defined and unevenly applied. Such dynamics may disproportionately affect applicants racialised as Middle Eastern or Muslim, who are more readily assumed to hold suspect political views than other applicants.

Yet this logic is not unique to Germany. France requires adherence to the valeurs de la République, a standard used to deny citizenship to individuals whose political or religious views are deemed incompatible with laïcité. The United States imposes an oath of loyalty and a “good moral character” requirement, long used to exclude applicants whose beliefs fall outside dominant constitutional narratives. Regensburg thus sits within a broader international pattern in which citizenship reflects more than legal status; it becomes a vehicle for defining, and enforcing, the boundaries of political belonging.

Munich: Antisemitism, Verfassungstreue, and the Boundaries of the Private Sphere

A contrasting dynamic appears in a third case from February 2025, decided by the Bavarian Higher Administrative Court in disciplinary proceedings against a Munich police officer who had served as the bodyguard to Charlotte Knobloch, the long-time leader of the Jewish community. Between 2014 and 2020, the officer had exchanged multiple WhatsApp messages—including “SH” and “HH” codes, an audio file imitating Hitler, and a comment suggesting Knobloch should be “vergast”—which the court described as beyond satire and indicative of a “deep-rooted antisemitic and contemptuous attitude.”

Despite these findings, the court held that there was no violation of the constitutional loyalty under § 33 (1) sentence 3 BeamtStG of the duty by a career police official appointed as a lifetime civil servant under the Beamtenstatus, since 2013. Two reasons were central. First, the messages fell within what the court treated as the “private sphere of communication,” protected by freedom of expression (Art. 5 GG) and personality/privacy rights (Art. 2 (1) in conjunction with Art. 1 (1) GG). Second, although the statements were “objectively unconstitutional in content,” they did not, in the court’s view, establish a manifest intention to abandon the free democratic basic order. The threshold for constitutional disloyalty was therefore not met. The officer was demoted, rather than removed from service.

The case highlights a structural tension. Public servants have enhanced loyalty duties, particularly those tasked with protecting vulnerable groups, yet doctrines of privacy, confidentiality, and narrowly construed constitutional thresholds can shield even explicit antisemitic speech from the most serious disciplinary consequences. The decision suggests that where antisemitism is relegated to the private sphere, the state’s broader commitments to combating antisemitism and safeguarding Jewish communal life may recede behind a more restrictive doctrinal framework—raising difficult questions about how far constitutional loyalty can reach, and what it is ultimately designed to protect.

The Fragile Grammar of Antisemitism in German Law

Before turning to the substantive analysis, it is important to restate that the doctrinal structures of Arbeitsrecht (labor law), Beamtenrecht (civil service law), and Staatsangehörigkeitsrecht (citizenship law) differ significantly in their legal foundations, purposes, and operative mechanisms. These differences necessarily shape both the applicable standards and the evidentiary logic of each field. With this caveat in mind, the following discussion proceeds not by comparing doctrines, but by treating the cases as analytically comparable in how they engage questions of legal membership, state power, and the boundaries of protected status.

Read in reverse, the cases bring their internal instabilities into sharper focus. In Munich, antisemitism was explicit, yet the court narrowly balanced the officer’s off-duty privacy against Knobloch’s safety. Staatsräson did not disappear altogether, but it receded: the court’s reading of the freiheitlich-demokratische Grundordnung left no room for anti-antisemitism or anti-racism as constitutional commitments. Instead, constitutional loyalty was pared down to its thinnest form—stripped of the protective ambitions the state rhetorically attaches to its relationship to Jewish life.

Regensburg offers the inverse configuration: precisely where antisemitism never appeared as a legal category, it structured the case indirectly. The Palestinian applicant was denied citizenship because his personal convictions did not align with Germany’s asserted special responsibility toward Israel. Here, Staatsräson framed the entire judgment.

When read alongside Mainz—where Anwar El Ghazi, a Dutch national of Moroccan descent, is also Muslim but already economically established and fully integrated into the European legal order—a different pattern becomes visible. It is possible to read these decisions as suggesting that courts tend to extend the full protections of proportionality more readily to the already economically settled, institutionally embedded Muslim subject, while subjecting the aspiring Muslim citizen to heightened tests of ideological reliability. This is not a necessary or comprehensive conclusion, but an interpretive thread that the cases make available.

The contrast becomes even clearer when set against the Munich case, where the white, native-born civil servant—despite openly antisemitic conduct—benefited from the broadest interpretive generosity. Considered jointly, the cases do not form a simple racial or religious hierarchy. Rather, they suggest a more layered stratification shaped by integration status, economic utility, and institutional embeddedness—one that operates unevenly across the domains of labor, civil service, and citizenship law.

Yet this reading is not exhaustive. Some of the divergence may also stem from the distinct constitutional frameworks at play: Munich and Mainz turn on freedom of expression and proportionality, whereas Regensburg treats Einbürgerung as a special category in which Staatsräson is invoked in a manner closer to external state action—its traditional and historical domain, rooted not in Machiavelli but in early “reason of state” theorists such as Giovanni Botero and later German cameralist writers. Whether or not one accepts this doctrinal logic, it offers another way of understanding the distance between the judgments.

Still, even this contrast only partly explains the divergence. Another instability cuts through the cases: time. Knobloch’s case unfolded in a far more fractured public climate—marked by rising hostility toward Israel and a growing backlash against German Jewish representatives—raising the question of whether these shifts shaped what the court deemed legally relevant. El Ghazi’s case makes the point sharper still: he was dismissed within weeks of 7 October, amid broad sympathy for Israel, yet judged many months later, after that sympathy had thinned and the devastation in Gaza had escalated. The slow pace of legal bureaucracy thus becomes a factor of its own: courts decide not only through doctrine but within political atmospheres that may have changed entirely by the time they rule.

Read together, the three cases do not support broad generalisations about judicial behaviour across German law; they arise in distinct doctrinal fields and respond to different legal questions. Yet one plausible reading of them suggests an emerging pattern: courts appear more willing to extend protections grounded in proportionality and neutrality to economically settled, institutionally embedded Muslim subjects, while subjecting aspiring Muslim citizens—particularly in naturalisation proceedings—to heightened tests of ideological reliability. This contrast is not definitive, but it highlights how legal context and institutional position shape the visibility and consequences of antisemitism in judicial reasoning.

Against this shifting backdrop—of stratified subjects, volatile political climates, and divergent legal categoriess—the question becomes unavoidable: what, in all of these decisions, is truly aimed at protecting Jews or Israelis—and, by implication, Arabs and Muslims whose cases become entangled in these logics—and what merely enlists them as symbolic anchors in Germany’s continuing project of national self-definition? The answer is sobering. Too often, the legal response to antisemitism reveals less about Jewish lives or the Middle East than about Germany itself—an asymmetry that is not only uncomfortable but dangerous, for it sidelines the presence, experience, and agency of Jews and other minorities both within and beyond Germany.