Irish criticisms of the actions of Israel in recent years have led to repeated accusations in the Israeli press and elsewhere that antisemitism is widespread in Irish society. One element of this accusation is the perception that the Irish education system is socialising children and young people into antisemitism. This idea was given momentum and apparent credibility last year by the appearance of a report on Irish school textbooks, published by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (Impact-se), an Israeli-British agency which has taken as its mission to monitor the image of Judaism and Israel in schoolbooks internationally. While this organisation mostly concentrates on Muslim countries in Asia and Africa, in the last year it has also published a series of studies of textbooks in European countries.

Its report on Ireland (henceforth ‘the Report’) was published in November 2024. It found ‘a troubling pattern of trivialisation and minimisation of the Holocaust’ along with misrepresentation of Judaism. The chief executive of Impact-se told The Irish Times that the textbooks ‘clearly promote anti-Semitism’, while the Israeli ambassador to Ireland said that ‘school textbooks in Ireland which demonise Israel and the Jewish religion have been published and distributed throughout the country for years’.

These are strong claims. They were taken up and even amplified in the Israeli and Jewish press, which referred to ‘troubling patterns of Holocaust minimisation, Jewish stereotypes, and one-sided views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’. To my knowledge, however, the Report itself has not been analysed at any length. If its conclusions are to be taken as a guide to teaching and curriculum formation, or as a guide to Irish social and political attitudes, then they need to be evaluated more thoroughly than they have been.

The Report sets out to discuss the treatment of Judaism, the Holocaust and the Israel-Palestine conflict in a selection of schoolbooks. These are textbooks for religion and history classes. The religion books go from Junior Infants (four- to five-year-olds) up to Senior Cycle (sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds), while the history books are all Senior Cycle.

The first thing to notice about the Report is that it has no substantial methodological introduction or discussion. It did not examine all of the Religion and History textbooks used in Irish schools, but no explanation or rationale is given for the selection of some textbooks rather than others, or for how those texts are analysed. The Report does have a brief section at the end entitled ‘methodology’. This is almost entirely a discussion of the qualities that are desirable in a textbook, that is to say that it is about aims rather than methodology as normally understood. It does however contain this assurance:

‘Our methodology is designed to consider every detail within the textbooks; it does not paraphrase, rely on interpretations, or attempt to illustrate preconceived notions.’

These are admirable aspirations, but they are very vague and in practice the sentence is misleading. It gives the impression that the Report aims at breadth and comprehensiveness, but this has not been achieved. To see the method of the Report in practice, we can take the history textbooks that were examined. The Report’s bibliography lists two, one by Stephen Tonge and one by Seán Delap. Only the book by Tonge is analysed in the Report itself; we are told nothing at all about the content of Delap’s book. Moreover, other widely-used texts are not included, such as one by Dermot Lucey, described by its publisher as the ‘market leader’. In other words, the Report only looks at one text among several, and we are not told how widely used that text is, or how typical it is. Making these things clear is a basic duty of any survey, and this Report fails completely in that respect. Its conclusions, as we will see, may be true of certain small parts of certain books, and even that is arguable, but they are not true of those books as a whole, let alone true of Irish school textbooks as a whole.

As noted, the Report considers the treatment of three topics in the textbooks: the Holocaust; the depiction of Judaism as a religion; and the Israel-Palestine conflict. Here we will examine the first two, since they are the most immediately germane to the issue of antisemitism. The relationship between political positions on the Israel-Palestine conflict on the one hand and antisemitism on the other is the subject of considerable disagreement and controversy, and therefore the third topic will not be discussed here.

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The other feature we might expect in a report of this kind is some information about the author – what is their background, their previous experience, their professional expertise? Have they conducted a survey of this kind before? Are they familiar with textbooks in other countries? Unusually, there is no information of any kind in the Report about its author, Inbal Goldberger, and I was unable to find anything about them on the website of Impact-se. The most likely candidate seems to be a person of that name who works in internet safety and who is described on the website of the World Jewish Congress as a former ‘military intelligence officer, specialising in counter-terrorism’, not an especially relevant qualification when it comes to questions of curriculum and teaching.

What is immediately striking about the Report’s discussion of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany is that it does not engage with the main text of the single book it examines and does not appear to have any criticisms to make of it. Instead, it focuses on paratextual details – captions for illustrations and abbreviated texts in panels that are separate from the main text.

The Report’s first example is a caption contained in Tonge’s textbook. A photograph of Auschwitz is labelled ‘the main gate of prisoner of war camp Auschwitz’. While one of its original functions was as a prisoner of war camp, it is incorrect to use this label to describe the main functions of the camp over its existence. As the Report points out, it became overwhelmingly a ‘death camp’ or an ‘extermination camp’. This is a very valid criticism of the caption, but it ignores completely the explicit and repeated description of Auschwitz as an ‘extermination camp’ in the main text of the same book (see below).

The second example comes from a text panel of ‘useful terms’ in a different edition of the same book. These are very short definitions of words or phrases encountered in the main text. The Report takes issue with the definition of the Holocaust as ‘the systematic destruction of the Jewish race’, describing it as ‘inaccurate, reductive and offensive’.

The Report’s criticism is a double one. First, the use of the term ‘race’. As the report points out, ‘Judaism is a religion, and Jews are an ethnic group’, so that referring to Jews as a ‘race’ recapitulates Nazi ideology. This is a reasonable objection, if overstated, and something like ‘the Jewish people’ would be preferable.

The second criticism of the definition made by the report concerns the term ‘destruction’. It maintains that the word:

‘does not adequately convey the systematic, industrialised murder of six million Jewish men, women, and children by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. The Nazis used mass shootings, gas chambers, starvation, and other brutal methods to commit genocide against Jews on an unprecedented scale.’

This is unconvincing at a number of levels. In the first place, the definitions given in the text panel are deliberately abbreviated. It is not their function to be wide-ranging and contextualised. In the same panel, the Gestapo is defined as ‘the secret police established in 1933’. Obviously a lot more could be added to this description as well, but the point of these definitions is to be as concise as possible. Enumerating the different types of murder or the various activities of the secret police would defeat the purpose of a short definition. The main text is the place for this kind of elaboration.

In the second place, saying that the term ‘destruction’ ‘does not adequately convey the systematic, industrialised murder’ seems to have forgotten the wording of the definition being criticised, which is ‘the systematic destruction’. It is finding fault with a definition for omitting a term which it in fact contains.

Finally, it is a strange argument to make that the term ‘destruction’ is in itself inadequate. The first comprehensive scholarly treatment of the Holocaust, the first book to delineate the full scale of the crime, was entitled The Destruction of the European Jews. It was published by Raul Hilberg in 1961 and has been fundamental to research in the area ever since. In the words of one standard survey of Holocaust historiography, it is ‘the most important work that has ever been written on the subject’; it is hard not to wonder whether the writer of the Report has heard of it. The term ‘destruction’ was clearly adequate for Hilberg and it is adequate for an Irish school textbook as well.

The final example relative to the Holocaust is in a religion textbook rather than a history one. Again it concerns a caption to a photograph of the main entrance of Auschwitz. The caption reads simply ‘Auschwitz’. This, according to the Report,

‘trivialises the historical and emotional gravity of the site … does not capture the site’s historical significance and the atrocities committed there … [and] disrespects the memory of the victims and the experiences of survivors.’

This completely fails to mention the text that the photograph is illustrating. It is a four-page description of the experience of Elie Wiesel in the camp. The text tells us that Wiesel’s ‘mother and sister were sent to the gas chambers’, refers to ‘the most horrific of conditions’ and ‘the brutal inhumanity all around them’, ‘the burning and the crematorium’ and ‘the agonisingly slow death of a young boy’ hanged for resistance.
It seems extraordinary to suggest that such an account trivialises the site or fails to respect the memory of the victims and survivors. After all, Wiesel was himself a survivor and his mother and sister were victims.

In this, and in the earlier example, the Report misunderstands the nature and function of captions, glossaries and other paratextual features. If a four-page discussion of Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln was illustrated by a portrait of Churchill or Lincoln, it would be perfectly normal to have a caption that consisted merely of that name. The important information is contained in the main text and does not need to be repeated.

More broadly, in neither of the first two examples mentioned above from the book by Tonge does the Report engage with the main text of that book or give a fair representation of it. In reality, the book contains a substantial and judicious account of the antisemitic nature of the Nazi state and of the Holocaust itself. There is a long section tracing the history of persecution in Germany from 1933 through the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht, culminating in this sentence: ‘The persecution of Jews was to get much worse during World War II, culminating in the mass murder of the Jews of Europe – an event that became known as the Holocaust.’ This is followed by a separate description of the Holocaust. This is the second part of that description (the first part concerns perpetrators and planning):

‘Jews were confined to easily controlled ghettos. The most famous was in Warsaw. They were then moved to extermination camps in eastern Europe such as Auschwitz, Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka and Majdanek.

The whole process was conducted with industrial efficiency:

– on arrival at the camps the old and the young were mainly killed in gas chambers using Zyklon B or carbon monoxide. The gas chambers were disguised as fake shower units so as not to cause mass panic.

– The bodies were burned in crematoria (ovens) or in open air pits

– the able-bodied were worked until they were murdered or died of disease. Some prisoners were also subject to medical experiments.

It is estimated that up to six million Jews perished during the Holocaust. In all about 60% of the pre-war Jewish population of Europe were killed, including nearly three million Polish Jews. The programme was carried out in great secrecy and was not brought to light until the Russians began to capture the camps in early 1945.’

This is necessarily a very bald account since it is in a school textbook for a curriculum that covers a very wide chronological and geographical range. However, no fair-minded reader could take it to be a ‘trivialisation’ and ‘minimisation’ of the Holocaust as the Report’s summary and conclusion suggest.

The story is the same with the other Senior Cycle history textbooks. I have not seen the English-language version of Seán Delap’s book, but the Irish-language version contains an entire chapter entitled ‘An Frithsheimíteachas agus an tUileloscadh’ (‘Antisemitism and the Holocaust’), which gives a serious and reliable account of the fate of Jews in Germany and German-occupied Europe between 1933 and 1945. The textbook not listed in the Report, that by Dermot Lucey, has an even fuller treatment of the Holocaust. It is in fact discussed twice, once in a chapter on the Nazi state and again in a different chapter on the impact of World War II.

The Impact-se Report completely fails to support its conclusion that History textbooks in Irish schools trivialise and minimise the Holocaust. That conclusion has been arrived at by ignoring the majority of the books in use in schools and by concentrating on a few details of the one book that has been examined, at the expense of that book’s substantial treatment of the subject.

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The section of the Report that deals with religious textbooks takes a similar approach, emphasising elements outside the main texts more than the main texts themselves. Here, in contrast to the treatment of the history book, the chapter texts are at least discussed, and they are found to be satisfactory, even admirable. The chapter on Judaism in one senior-cycle textbook is summarised as follows:

‘The chapter titled “Judaism—the Way of the Torah” offers a comprehensive overview of Jewish faith and practices. It emphasises Judaism’s status as the world’s oldest monotheistic faith and highlights key aspects such as the Shema prayer, the importance of the Torah, and Jewish values like justice and compassion. The chapter also addresses the Jewish people’s commitment to learning and preserving their faith through generations despite historical challenges. This portrayal is balanced and educational, providing a clear understanding of Jewish beliefs and practices.’

This does not sound like an antisemitic book. It should also be noted that this chapter about Judaism is much more substantial than that in the same book about the largest non-Christian denomination in Ireland, Islam (seventeen pages as opposed to eleven; there are roughly 2,800 Jews in Ireland and 80,000 Muslims). One reason for this is that it contains a brief history of the Jewish community in Ireland, including a large photograph of Gerald Goldberg (1912-2003), who was a leading light in that community and was at one point lord mayor of Cork. The photograph shows him in a synagogue in that city. Of course Muslims in Ireland do not have such a history, since they have arrived in significant numbers only in the last few decades; but the overall effect here is to show the Jewish community as a more integral part of the Irish historical experience. This runs counter to a statement made by the chief executive of Impact-se at the time of the Report’s release, stating that Irish textbooks ‘view Jews and Judaism as a lesser part of Ireland’s social fabric’.

Moreover, this chapter is immediately followed by a full page of classroom assignments about Holocaust remembrance. It begins with an account of one of the small number of Irish Jews that were murdered in the Holocaust and contains questions such as ‘Discuss why it is important that Ireland acknowledges Holocaust Day and honours it with senior representation from the government’ and ‘Suggest and give details about five ways in which a school could acknowledge Holocaust Day.’ The Holocaust, in other words, is discussed in a religion textbook as well as in history ones, and it is presented not simply as a historical event but as an object of major commemoration in Ireland in the present day. Again, this is the opposite of ‘trivialising the Holocaust’.

A different religion textbook contains a section on the Bar Mitzvah, illustrated with large photographs. The report approves of this also:

‘The section on Bar Mitzvah ceremonies includes an interview with a Jewish boy who recently experienced his Bar Mitzvah. It explains the significance of this milestone, how Jewish boys prepare for it, and the rituals involved. This narrative helps readers understand the importance of the Bar Mitzvah in Jewish culture and how it marks a young person’s transition to adulthood within the community.’

A textbook for younger students is commended in the same terms:

‘The inclusion of detailed and respectful descriptions of Jewish traditions, values, and ceremonies helps provide a balanced and accurate portrayal of Judaism. Such content contributes to a well-rounded education on the diverse religious landscape, fostering understanding and respect among students.’

The beliefs and rituals of Judaism, in other words, are given a fair and sympathetic portrayal in Irish schoolbooks on religion. As with the history books, the report takes issue with some illustrations and a panel of definitions in some of these books.

The first is a cartoon strip illustrating the death of Jesus Christ in a book for Junior Infant classes (four- to five-year-olds). The first image, labelled ‘Some people did not like Jesus’ shows Christ in front of a group of people who are shown wearing tallits. This was raised with the publisher, on the grounds that by identifying the ‘people who did not like Jesus’ as Jewish, it could promote the antisemitic motif of deicide. The publishers changed the image to one where the Report says they are ‘wearing neutral clothing that does not associate them with any specific religious group’. This is not the action of a publisher of antisemitic textbooks.

The second example is a text table in a Junior Cycle textbook (thirteen- to fifteen-year-olds) that explores the approaches of different religions to issues of violence and war. This is the verdict of the report:

‘A balanced portrayal of all religions should include both their peaceful principles and the conditions under which conflict is permitted.

The text of this table, “Understanding of Peace and War” portrays Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam as inherently peaceful and nonviolent, emphasising their quest for justice without addressing their historical complexities, such as the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, the 9/11 terror attack, or the Crusades.

The text’s characterisation of the role of justice in Judaism is biased and inaccurate for several reasons. It states that Judaism believes engaging in violence and war is necessary to achieve justice. In so doing, it ignores the diverse teachings in Jewish texts that advocate for peace, justice, and the sanctity of life.’

It is true that the peaceful elements of Judaism are not mentioned in this table whereas those of other religions are described very briefly (though not those of Humanists). At the same time, this section of the Report does not fully represent the content of the table in question:

– first, the texts in this table, like the photographic captions, are extremely concise distillations, between thirty and forty-five words. They do not set out to discuss any historical cases or refer to specific texts, nor do they have the scope for that.

– second, the positions of the different religions on violence are presented in the textbook as being much closer than the Report suggests. Here are the sections about the different religions that represent their views on war and violence:

‘Hindu sacred texts also include teachings that promote war as a moral duty under certain situations.’

‘Judaism believes that violence and war are sometimes necessary to promote justice.’

‘Christians believe that war is rarely justified and should be avoided unless certain conditions are met.’

‘Islam allows war in self-defence, to defend Islam (but not to spread Islam) and to protect those who are oppressed.’

For all religions, what is emphasised is the conditions under which war and violence are permitted.

– finally, the Report’s paraphrase does not accurately represent what the textbook says about Judaism. It takes the description ‘sometimes necessary’ and renders it as ‘necessary’, a markedly different statement.

Other examples in the Report look at the social role of religion. The first concerns the problem of homelessness which in Ireland, as elsewhere in Europe, has become a crisis in recent years. The Report takes a section on homelessness from the same Junior Cycle religion textbook discussed earlier. That section examines Christian, Muslim and secular organisations that focus on homelessness. The Muslim and secular organisations are named (Muslim Daughters of Eire, Alice Leahy Trust). The Report criticises the omission of Jewish organisations from this discussion in the following terms:

‘In this material, only Christian, Muslim, and nonreligious organisations are presented as addressing the problem of homelessness in Ireland. Jewish social welfare organisations are notably absent, despite their contributions to alleviating homelessness and other social issues in Ireland. This omission is significant for several reasons.

Stating that homelessness is “a serious problem in Ireland” and then showcasing only Christian, Muslim, and non-religious efforts, implicitly suggest that they are the only groups addressing the issue. This is an inaccurate and incomplete representation of the collective efforts within Ireland.

By excluding Jewish organisations, the material sends an indirect message that the Jewish community is not involved in solving pressing societal issues and is only concerned with the welfare of fellow Jews. This portrayal can lead to misconceptions about the Jewish community’s role and contributions to Irish society, affecting how students perceive the Jewish community. It may give rise to potentially reinforcing stereotypes that Jews are not part of the compassionate and caring fabric of Irish society. This exclusion does a disservice to the values of inclusivity and diversity.’

In fact, there does not appear to be a Jewish organisation in Ireland that is primarily directed at homelessness and that therefore would fit the criteria of this section. (I contacted Impact-se multiple times over several weeks to ask them which organisation they had in mind, but received no answer or acknowledgment.) This is not a criticism of the Jewish community – as noted earlier, it is one-thirtieth the size of the Muslim community, to say nothing of Christians or the secular population, and it is hardly surprising that it does not contain as wide a spectrum of social organisations as those others do. Parity of esteem for different religions is a vital goal, particularly in a school textbook on religion. However, it should not lead to the distortion or the negation of reality.

The second criticism is of a section that shows a picture of a Christmas message from the head of the Islamic Cultural Centre of Ireland. The caption to the picture reads: ‘Members of other world religions send greetings to one another when it is a special time of the year. The leader of the Islamic Cultural Centre of Ireland wished Christians a Merry Christmas with this message.’

The Report criticises this caption, saying that ‘the warm connections between the Jewish community and other religious communities are not mentioned’. This is not a valid objection – the Jewish community in Ireland is clearly included in the phrase ‘members of other world religions’.

We can now return to the general statement of method made in the Report:

‘Our methodology is designed to consider every detail within the textbooks; it does not paraphrase, rely on interpretations, or attempt to illustrate preconceived notions.’

It is clear that this has not been adhered to. In the first place, the Report does not undertake a comprehensive survey of the textbooks available and in use in Irish schools – it selects a few but does not explain the basis of its selection. Then, in the books that are examined, the criticisms focus on elements in the book that usually do not form part of the main text, which in some cases are peripheral to that main text, while ignoring that main text. Finally, those elements are subjected to interpretations that are not always persuasive and in some cases are tendentious.

The British government came to a similar conclusion about an earlier report by Impact-se that assessed textbooks used in Palestinian schools. The Secretary of State for International Development told Parliament in 2018 that

‘Our assessment is that the Impact-se report was not objective in its findings and lacked methodological rigour. For example, some claims were made on the basis of a partial or subjective reading of the text, some findings are presented out of context, and there was limited information available about the sampling approach to select textbooks to analyse.’

This would be a fair summary of the Report on Ireland also.

As a result, the analysis contained in the Report cannot be said to justify its conclusions that Irish school textbooks misrepresent Judaism and minimise the Holocaust. It goes without saying that students, teachers, textbook publishers and educational authorities should not pay a great deal of attention to this Report.

 If Irish schoolbooks do not justify the conclusions of the Report, those conclusions in turn do not justify much of the press and public coverage that followed. Some of the wilder and more irresponsible statements include the suggestion of the Jewish Chronicle that ‘Irish school textbooks are riddled with classic antisemitic tropes’, while the Times of Israel referred in two separate stories to ‘profound distortions of the Holocaust, Israel, Judaism, and Jewish history in Irish textbooks’ (illustrating both articles with the same photograph of Belfast – a different jurisdiction that has of course a different school curriculum and different textbooks). The New York newspaper The Algemeiner began its story by saying that ‘School textbooks in Ireland foster antisemitic hatred, downplaying the horrors of the Holocaust’.

All of these stories are exaggerated to the point of disinformation. It is a pity that their readers will not to be able to see the textbooks for themselves, instead of tendentious journalistic amplifications of a seriously flawed report. There they would see that Irish schoolbooks’ treatment of Judaism and the Holocaust are fair and sympathetic, and by extension that Irish attitudes in general towards Judaism and the Irish Jewish community are overwhelmingly positive.

Niall O Ciosáin taught history at the University of Galway until 2024. He has published articles on the Great Famine and popular memory, book history and popular reading. His most recent book is Print and the Celtic Languages: Publishing and Reading in Irish, Welsh, Gaelic and Breton, 1700–1900 (Routledge 2023).

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