Baseline American anti-Semitism
I think it's fair to say that a religious group that has had 6 million of its coreligionists killed within living memory has the right to be jumpy. To say they should just be very still and hope it will pass by -- the Rabbit Strategy -- ignores the lesson that history taught them about silence. This is especially true when one considers that this film is not released to a limited market. If it were limited strictly to the United States, whose closest brush to a pogrom was the exile and execution of non-Puritans in colonial Massachusetts, there would be much less cause for alarm. Nevertheless, the Klan is still around, and Jews still number among its targets.
Even disregarding the Klan as easily-identified perpetrators, there is, and has always been, a "background level" of anti-Semitic acts in the United States. Most of them involve vandalism of synagogues and other identifiably Jewish buildings; i.e., the usual assholes who think it's "cool" to spray-paint swastikas and slogans (although there is a discernable fraction of genuine Jew-haters).
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) keeps statistics; the 2001 figures (apparently the most recent, unfortunately) are here. Their collection of press releases relating to anti-Semitism in the US is here.
It's too early to tell if The Passion of the Christ will inflame the passions of would-be fanatical avengers beyond whatever 'socialization skills' they may possess, but this should aid some comparison with future numbers - a baseline, of sorts.
I presume the film will have (or already has had) wide distribution in Europe. It may be much more difficult to separate the causes of anti-Semitism there - to attribute it to Passion, for instance - than it is in the US.Many scholars say the only thing new about Europe's anti-Semitism is the target audience: young Muslim immigrants. The basic ideology -- that powerful Jewish interests control the world, that Jews are too rich, that Jews are conniving -- is painfully familiar.
"These are the old European anti-Semitic stereotypes recycled through the Middle East back to the European Muslim community," said the Berlin Center's Wetzel.
Mosques play a big role. Many European Muslim communities import their prayer leaders from the Middle East, and often those preachers bring with them radical ideas and disdain for European history and traditions.
[ . . . ]
A key question in the debate on the new anti-Semitism is whether it poses the same level of threat to European Jews as the more familiar type espoused by Europe's increasingly popular far right.
Some analysts have argued that Muslim anti-Semites in Europe are a marginalized and powerless minority whose rantings can safely be ignored, but a smooth, telegenic politician such as Austria's Joerg Haider, who has the ability to take anti-Semitism mainstream, is a far more dangerous threat.
[-- 'selectively' quoted from a Jan 9, 2004 Chicago Tribune article found in the online version of the Detroit Free Press]