These days, all talk here is of the ramifications of taking in more than one million asylum seekers who arrived over the past year.
Many of the migrants are Muslim and from countries with a deep antipathy toward Israel, leading to a worried discussion about the degree to which some refugees may have brought anti-Semitic attitudes with them. This stoked existing fears among Jews here, who believe anti-Semitism is already on the rise, along with support for far-right movements.
The concern is apparently so great that Chancellor Angela Merkel, without specifically mentioning the Muslim influx, addressed anti-Jewish feeling head-on in her latest weekly podcast.
“Unfortunately,” she said, “anti-Semitism is more widespread than we naturally imagine. And so we must confront it.”
The Central Council of Jews in Germany counts just over 100,000 members — compared with the estimated 520,000 Jews in Germany in early 1933. In the quarter-century since German reunification, Israelis and Jews have flocked to Berlin, where some 45,000 Jews are now said to live.
Ms. Merkel is an unflinching supporter of Israel and Jewish institutions. Schoolchildren learn about the Holocaust, and Germany is promising classes to instruct new arrivals in its standards, customs and beliefs. Events to celebrate Jewish identity and the role of Jews in Germany are common. Leading politicians and city figures gathered on Jan. 7 for the 90th birthday of W. Michael Blumenthal, the former United States Treasury secretary and founding chief executive of the Jewish Museum Berlin, which has counted 10 million visitors since it opened in 2001.
Mr. Blumenthal, born and raised in and around Berlin before his family fled the Nazis, is among the many Americans who have praised Ms. Merkel for welcoming refugees.
Yet even before the migrant influx, synagogues, Jewish schools and other organizations operated only under constant police protection. And now, there is apprehension over the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Muslims raised in countries where anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli sentiment are more virulent than in Turkey, the country of origin for most of Germany’s perhaps four million Muslims.
As Salomon Korn, the head of Frankfurt’s Jewish community, put it in a public discussion this month: With the new arrivals, “we must operate on the assumption that they have a different relationship to Jews than the Muslims who have lived here to date.”
There have been no reports of anti-Semitic attacks by recently arrived migrants.
Even before the tide of migrants, some Jews worried that anti-Jewish sentiment was again becoming acceptable.
Tamara Anthony, 38, a journalist at the public broadcaster NDR, stirred a furor with a nationally televised commentary — also seen a half-million times on Facebook — in which she described challenging a well-dressed man in a chic Hamburg bar after overhearing him say that Jews belonged in the gas chambers.
“ ‘I am a Jew,’ I said. ‘So you want to murder me?’ ‘In that case, yes,’ came the answer,” Ms. Anthony said.
“It cannot be left to the Jews alone” to fight anti-Semitism, she added.
Reached three days later, Ms. Anthony was surprised by how many people praised what they called her courage.
“I find it really bad,” she said, “if we have to say in Germany that it is courageous to say that one is Jewish.”
Ms. Anthony said she did not practice her religion; she acknowledges her Jewishness but has never advertised it. She expressed concern that politicians were content with lofty speeches that missed the reality on the ground.
In the Ruhr city of Wuppertal, the 2,000-strong Jewish community was outraged last year when a court gave only a probationary sentence to three Palestinians who threw gasoline bomb at the local synagogue in 2014. The three said they were protesting war in Gaza.
An appeal on Jan. 18 resulted in stiffer sentences but did not acknowledge that anti-Semitism was involved, said Leonid Goldberg, a leader of the Jewish community in Wuppertal. “It is nothing less than an invitation to all others to behave the same,” he said.
And with all the new Muslim arrivals, it will get worse, he feared.
“They won’t change just because they live in Germany,” he said.