MY FIRST reaction to the swastika someone drew on our house a few days ago was bemusement. Neo-Nazi graffiti seemed anachronistic and incongruous in London, 2014. At least, it felt that way to me. I had an orthodox Jewish upbringing but have since severely lapsed. My wife is not Jewish, which means that—at least by the rules of the orthodox rabbinate—neither are my children. At our house the only visible indicator of my Jewishness is a mezuzah: a small, ritual capsule that Jews affix to their doorposts (ours has a leopard-print design and came from Paris). A mezuzah is a lowest common denominator of Jewish identity; not having one would feel like outright apostasy. The swastika was scribbled alongside it, which is why I am sure this was not some random scrawl. Mine is not a very Jewish neighbourhood, so it was creepily surprising that anyone passing our house would have sufficient anti-Semitic expertise to recognise the mezuzah. None of our neighbours had ever noticed it. The bafflement was followed by a pang of guilt, since my choice to publicise my Jewishness, albeit discreetly, had incurred this vandalism, and perhaps something worse: smashed windows, nasty stuff in the letterbox, who could say what might be next? Because the swastika was plainly a threat. It said, “We know where you live”.

It was feeling responsible that, in short order, made me feel angry, too—because, of course, I wasn’t the culprit, and it was absurd and demeaning to think I was. Scrubbing off the swastika, a task that seemed to belong to another century and a different country, left me crosser still. As for a politician hit by an egg, there is always something undignified about a defaced building and its clean-up, an indignity that, at some level, the perpetrators must anticipate and intend.

The anger, like the swastika, wore off fairly quickly. The police came and were nice about it. But, as any brush with crime tends to, this one left a question about the sort of society this is.

I have personally experienced anti-Semitism only a couple of times before. Walking home from synagogue in London as a child I was insulted by a gang of thuglets. At university I met people from posh schools where Jews were rare and casual anti-Semitism routine (for some, “to Jew” was amusing slang for “to cheat”). Unpleasant moments, but in no way has my life or career been hampered by my background. I know anti-Semitism is out there—on Britain’s small far right and extreme left, among a minority of Muslims, in misconceived football chants, and in the moronic comments of dim-witted MPs who have compared Israel to Nazi Germany. But it has scarcely touched me, nor anyone else I know, directly. I have always assumed that Britain in the late 20th and early 21st century is, along with contemporary North America, among the safest ever places for Jews to live (and, for unfortunate reasons, safer by far than Israel).

I checked—and in fact the statistics on anti-Semitic attitudes and crime support that assumption. A recent study of anti-Semitic views by the Anti-Defamation League, an American watchdog, found that, of 102 countries surveyed, Britain was among the six least anti-Semitic, and marginally less so than the United States. Greece emerged as by far the most anti-Semitic country in western Europe; France was second. Separate polling by Pew Research echoes those findings. It suggests that Britain is less anti-Semitic than most other big European countries, and that, across the continent (including in Britain), Muslims are much more unpopular than Jews.

Within Britain, the data on anti-Semitic attacks also turn out to be quietly encouraging, albeit with the proviso that much hate crime goes unreported. The Community Security Trust (CST), which monitors anti-Semitic incidents in Britain, counted fewer of them in 2013 than in any year since 2005. The CST notes that spikes in aggressive anti-Semitism here tend to be triggered by external events such as war in the Middle East. Compared with the Jews of France and Belgium, who have suffered fatal shootings in the recent past—and compared with other minorities in Britain itself—British Jews seem to have little reason to fear.

So the evidence suggests that modern Britain is indeed an almost uniquely benign place for Jews (lapsed or otherwise) to live. My swastika was upsetting, but it was also unusual. All the same, there is something residually demoralising about it, and in these relative judgments. They imply that some degree of anti-Semitism is inevitable—as, apparently, it is. Even in this enlightened age, and the most cosmopolitan city in the world, this primitive, irrational, amazingly tenacious prejudice is still with us, written into our culture and occasionally on our walls.