THERE is a concept gaining traction in philosophy and critical theory called epistemic injustice — the idea that certain groups are systematically denied credibility as knowledge-holders and witnesses of their own experience. We are familiar with this in the context of racism, where the pain of Black victims has historically been minimised, sanitised, or simply disbelieved. The denial is not only physical or economic; it operates at the level of testimony itself.

Jews are increasingly subject to an analogous phenomenon — epistemic antisemitism. It manifests not in overt slurs but in the subtle, persistent delegitimization of Jewish accounts of antisemitism. Jewish people who name their own persecution are recast as exaggerating, instrumentalising victimhood, or conflating legitimate political criticism with hatred. Their ability to identify and communicate experiences of prejudice itself are made suspect. The effect is a form of double injury: first the hatred, then the invalidation of the claim that hatred occurred.

Cachalia’s statistical framing, however unintentional, in a Business Day op-ed  “Anti-Semitism response risks undermining UK legal principles“, performs exactly this function. It takes data that, when correctly interpreted, reveals Jewish people to be the most disproportionately targeted religious group in England and Wales, and inverts it into evidence that antisemitism is a lesser problem.

Cachalia’s  opinion piece on antisemitism and UK legal principles thus contains a statistical error serious enough to undermine his central argument — and serious enough, I would suggest, to illustrate the very phenomenon it inadvertently enacts.

Cachalia implies that antisemitic attacks are less alarming because they are fewer in absolute number than anti-Muslim attacks. This is the base-rate fallacy in its most elementary form. Raw counts are meaningless without accounting for population size.

Britain’s Jewish community numbers approximately 292,000 people — roughly 0.5% of the population. Britain’s Muslim community numbers approximately 3.9 million — thirteen times larger. Comparing absolute incident totals between groups of such radically different sizes tells us nothing about relative risk or the intensity of targeting.  The correct measure should be hate crimes per capita. Cachalia’s claim, as a basis for arguing that antisemitism deserves less urgent legal or institutional attention, is statistically indefensible.

The per capita data, drawn from official UK Home Office statistics, tells a starkly different story. In the year ending March 2025, Jewish people experienced approximately 106 hate crimes per 10,000 people. Muslims experienced approximately 12 per 10,000. Jewish people were therefore victimised at a rate roughly nine times higher. The argument that antisemitism warrants less urgency because the absolute numbers are lower is not just wrong — it represents a dangerous inversion.

I want to name what this kind of error does, by calling out ‘epistemic anti-semitism’ because it is not merely a statistical mistake. The numbers are not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether Jewish testimony about Jewish suffering will be received with the same epistemic good faith extended to others.

It should be. And the statistics, properly read, demand it.