When the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was dedicated in 1993, it had no equivalent in continental Europe. Berlin’s Jewish Museum only opened to visitors six years later. Yet America’s sins during the Holocaust were, at most, sins of omission. For continental Europe, it was a different story.

Today, the landscape has changed. Holocaust museums and memorials are springing up like mushrooms across much of the continent which — both as witness and accomplice — hosted the slaughter of six million Jews. The infamy of the Shoah has been elevated to the incarnation of the purest form of evil, and stands at the centre of united Europe’s new identity. Europeans reclaim Europe’s Jewish past as their own, through museums and lovingly restored synagogues. Klezmer and Yiddish are in; jackboot extremism is out.