Spain Logged 221 Antisemitic Incidents in 2025 — and Jewish Children Are the Only Ones Going to School Under Police Guard

But the report's most revealing figure isn't the rise itself. It's the gap. Spain's Interior Ministry counts only 69 hate crimes and incidents targeting Jews in 2025 — admittedly a sharp jump from 37 in 2024, but three times fewer than the community's own tally. Methodological differences don't explain it all: the gap reveals that in Spain, two-thirds of the antisemitism Jews actually experience never enters the official statistics. A hatred the state doesn't see is a hatred the state doesn't fight.

And it is no accident that this blindness flourishes precisely under the government of Pedro Sánchez, one of Israel's most virulent accusers in Europe, who invokes "genocide" from every podium. María Royo, spokeswoman for the FCJE, points directly at the "campaigns against Israel": certain groups, she says, "accuse all Jews." And she adds: "The security forces do everything in their power, but the government, politicians, the media and opinion leaders could be much more rigorous and careful to prevent this situation." Translation: the police protect the synagogues that political speech singles out.

Esteban Ibarra, president of the MCI — a Spanish human rights organization, not a Jewish institution — drives the point home: "Antisemitism is not an opinion or a political disagreement: it is a form of hatred and discrimination against Jews. When it is tolerated, normalized or minimized, coexistence deteriorates and democracy weakens."

When it is tolerated, normalized or minimized, coexistence deteriorates and democracy weakens."

This is the angle Madrid refuses to look at. Spain has built itself a flattering narrative: that of a country that settled the account of 1492 through the citizenship law offered to Sephardic descendants, and can therefore criticize Israel in perfect historical innocence. The FCJE report shatters that narrative. A country where Jewish schoolchildren are "the only ones" studying under police guard has not settled its history — it is replaying it, with updated vocabulary. The question is no longer whether Sánchez is an antisemite. It is the plain fact that under his government, being Jewish in Spain is once again — with numbers to prove it — a condition of risk. And that a state which counts three times fewer incidents than its own Jewish citizens has already chosen not to know.