Jews and Judaism have been present in the territory of what is now Switzerland since before the emergence of the medieval Old Swiss Confederacy in the 13th century (the first communities settling in Basel in 1214).

A ring with a Menorah depiction found in Augusta Raurica (Kaiseraugst, Switzerland) in 2001 attests to Jewish presence in Germania Superior, a province of the Roman Empire.

In the Middle Ages, as in many places in Europe, they frequently suffered persecution, for example in 1294 in Bern many Jews of the city were executed and the survivors expelled under the pretext of the murder of a Christian boy.

As the island was repeatedly flooded and devastated, in 1750 the Surbtal Jews asked the Tagsatzung to establish a cemetery in the vicinity of their communities in the Surb valley.

Once a year, the communal chevra kadisha (hevra kadishah, Aramaic: חברא קדישא, Ḥebh'ra Qaddisha, meaning "holy society") visited the graves on the island.

Two instrumental Jewish figures in the struggle for emancipation were teacher and publicist Markus G. Dreyfus[11] and rabbi and historian Meyer Kayserling.

Jews living in the Surb Valley once spoke a dialect of Western Yiddish, traces of which can be still found today in the region.

Western Yiddish is mainly a mixture of High German dialects, with Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary, as well as some influence from Romance languages.

This plateau is due to immigration, without which Swiss Jews could not have prevented a demographic setback, linked to an aging population and the many mixed marriages.

In 2002, the Swiss government allowed Jews to import kosher meat, however members of Switzerland's Jewish community were not satisfied.

[34] One of the opponents to the demands of the Jewish community, Erwin Kessler (president of the Vaud section of the Society for the protection of animals) said: "either become vegetarians or leave Switzerland".

For this, and other comments comparing Jewish butchers to Nazis, Kessler was sentenced to jail for five months under Swiss laws against incitement of racial hatred in 2004.

[36] Approximately 23,000 Jews found refuge in Switzerland, yet the government decided to stay neutral and to only be a country of transit for Jewish refugees.

However, in mid-2001, Beobachter retracted its claims and exonerated Rothmund based on new documents and stated the German side made the initial suggestion.

[36] According to the Bergier Commission final report, during the Second World War, Switzerland granted asylum to 25,000 Jews while denying around 20,000 refugees (of which a significant portion were estimated to be Jewish) admission to the country in total.

[42] However, Serge Klarsfeld, the French-Jewish historian, activist and Nazi Hunter stated in 2013 that the Swiss authorities rejected fewer WWII Jewish refugees than believed.

Centred around the Polish embassy in Bern, a network of diplomats and other supporters worked to provide between 7000 and 10,000 endangered Jews with Latin American travel documents and identity papers.

A yearlong study found that inhibitions against the open expression of racist views had been swept away by the controversy of Swiss banks' responsibility to compensate Holocaust victims for assets lost during World War II.

[47][48] A survey from 2014 found that more than one in four Swiss residents are anti-Semitic, making Switzerland's population one of the most anti-Jewish in Western Europe, according to an online report released by the Anti-Defamation League.

From July 2014 and the outbreak of the war in Gaza, the Federation of Jewish Communities in Switzerland reported twice as many incidents as usually occur during an entire year.

[50] The report's conclusions are that the current situation is far more dramatic than other wars in the Middle East that have caused a similar reaction by the Swiss population.

[52] One of those incidents was reported on by Haaretz: "An Orthodox Jew from Belgium was lightly wounded in an assault in Switzerland, which witnesses called an anti-Semitic attack.

The victim, identified only as A. Wachsstock, was walking toward his car, where his wife and four children were waiting for him, when a man in his sixties began hitting him and shouting anti-Semitic profanities, including “Juden raus,” or “Jews, get out” in German.

[53] In February 2024, Swiss police investigated a winter sport rental at the foot of the Pischa mountain in Davos for banning Jewish customers (the notice in Hebrew at the rental read "Due to various very annoying incidents, including the theft of a sled, we no longer rent sports equipment to our Jewish brothers.

Additionally, initiatives will focus on educating both foreign guests and the local population about Swiss customs and the history of Jewish life in the region.

The attack was allegedly carried out by a 15-year-old Swiss national of Tunisian descent who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and called for a “battle against the Jews".

[59] The Times of Israel reported that antisemitic incidents in Switzerland tripled between October 7, 2023 and March 2024 and called the increase "unprecedented."

This was prompted by developments in neighbouring Germany where a court ruled so-called 'voluntary circumcisions' amount to wilful criminal bodily harm.