Wales has few Jewish residents but persistent antisemitism, professor says
A Bangor University professor's new book examines how Welsh attitudes toward Jews have persisted for centuries despite a tiny community.
By Hassan Okoye ·
Wales has a Jewish population of about 2,044 people, roughly 0.07 percent of the country's 3.1 million residents, yet antisemitism remains present in Welsh life, according to Nathan Abrams, a professor at Bangor University who studies Welsh Jewry.
Abrams, who was born into a Jewish family in North London and has lived in Wales for twenty years, speaks Welsh fluently. His recent book, Jews in the Welsh Imagination: Medieval Times to the Present, traces Welsh attitudes toward Jews across the centuries. For most of Wales's history, he said, no Jews lived there. "The fascination the Welsh have with Jews is inversely proportional to the numbers," Abrams said. "So the absence of Jews hasn't meant the absence of antisemitism or similar attitudes. It's actually the opposite."
The Jewish population is concentrated in Cardiff, which has a Reform synagogue and an Orthodox synagogue. A Chabad synagogue serves Llandudno, and small community-organized groups or individual Jews live in other cities. Reporting on antisemitism in Wales often disappears into UK-wide statistics, which do not typically break down figures by country.
Welsh policing figures recorded 6,157 hate crimes across Wales between April 2025 and March 2026. Of those, 4,098 were motivated by race and 325 by religion, with the religious category down from 451 the prior period. Those figures do not identify which religion was targeted. The Community Security Trust separately logged 25 antisemitic incidents associated with Wales during calendar year 2025: 13 in North Wales, 8 in South Wales, 2 in Dyfed-Powys and 2 in Gwent.
A Freedom of Information disclosure from Dyfed-Powys Police shows the force recorded 17 crimes classified as anti-Jewish in 2025, up from 12 in 2024, an increase of about 42 percent. Those figures cover only the Dyfed-Powys policing area. The Welsh Local Government Association has met with Jewish community representatives from across Wales to discuss antisemitism. Representatives described routine verbal abuse, worries about children in schools, and people changing their behavior to avoid identifying as Jewish in public.
The South Wales Jewish Representative Council said the community "is long-established and deeply rooted" but that "the rise in antisemitism in recent years has left many people shaken and concerned."
Abrams said much of the antisemitism he observes operates through social media and gathers around the Israel-Palestine conflict. He described a pattern he called "ambient antisemitism," pointing to demonstrations, posters being torn down, and stickers put up or removed. "It's not specifically hurting Jews, physically, but it creates an environment in which Jews are not comfortable being themselves," he said.
His own experience is shaped by living in northwest Wales, a highly nationalist, Welsh-speaking area where Plaid Cymru, the left-leaning Welsh nationalist party, holds support. Plaid Cymru's official stance is critical of Israel and supportive of Palestine; the party has long campaigned for Palestinian state recognition and considers Israel's actions to be genocide. In September 2025, the party leader called for "harsh sanctions against the Israeli Government" over its actions in Gaza. Abrams said this political current shapes how antisemitism appears in his region: "Because of this, the antisemitism here is kind of an obsession with Israel. You'll get the antisemitism that is expressed by people who don't think they're being antisemitic."
He also drew a class line in who engages with the issue. "If you're working class, you probably don't care; you probably hate the demonstrators more. Whereas the middle-class protesters are kind of indistinguishable from the academic antisemitism," Abrams said. He added that such views are often not voiced in front of Jewish people. Abrams's book argues that Welsh attitudes toward Jews began with Israel and, 1600 years later, have returned to the same point: "The complexity of Jewishness is still reduced to the Middle East conflict," he said.
