Nearly a quarter of British people would be unwilling to accept Jews as members of their family, new research has found.

The Pew Research Centre found 23 per cent of all respondents say “no” when asked “would you be willing to accept Jews as members of your family.” 

This was the second highest of the western European countries surveyed, behind only Italy, where 25 per cent said they would not accept a Jewish family member.

Board of Deputies President Elect Marie van der Zyl told the JC: “The Pew survey holds a mirror up to some worrying prejudices in British society...

"The report underscores the vital need for more of this work, highlighting that to ‘know a Jewish person’ and to ‘know a Muslim’, are among the best ways of preventing prejudice.

"The power of simply bringing people together must never be underestimated.”

Pew conducted 24,000 telephone interviews with randomly selected people across western Europe, including nearly 12,000 non-practising Christians.

Of the British people who responded, 69 per cent said they would accept a Jew as a family member and seven per cent said they did not know.

The Pew report found that “overall, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish opinions are more common among Christians, at all levels of practice, than they are among Western Europeans with no religious affiliation.”

But the report added: “This is not to say that most Christians hold these views: On the contrary, by most measures and in most countries surveyed, only minorities of Christians voice negative opinions about immigrants and religious minorities.”

It found some clear correlations, noting “those who express negative views of Muslims are also more likely to express negative views of Jews” and “people who express negative attitudes toward Muslims and Jews are also more likely to express negative attitudes toward immigrants, and vice versa.”

The report also found that “substantial minorities in some countries hold negative stereotypes about Jews.”

In Spain, Portugal and Italy, the percentage of people who agreed with the statements “Jews always pursue their own interests and not the interest of the country they live in,” and “Jews always overstate how much they have suffered” was 30 per cent or above.

In the UK, the number of those who agreed with each of the statements was 16 per cent.

In most western European countries, people were likely to say that they knew “not much” or “nothing at all” about Judaism – in the UK, over two thirds of people, 67 per cent responded as such.

However, the report stresses: “The results also do not imply that Christian theology or religious teachings necessarily lead to anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim or anti-Jewish positions; on the contrary, many churches have been active in resettling refugees from the Middle East and elsewhere.

“Theoretically, the causal connection could go in either direction... It could be that holding anti-immigrant positions may lead a person to embrace Europe’s historically dominant religious identity, rather than that identifying with Europe’s historically dominant religious group leads a person to take anti-minority positions.

"The survey data show a statistical correlation – not a clear relationship of cause and effect.”