Jews had lived in Antwerp since the sixteenth century, when families of Iberian converso origin settled there, but the community that shapes the city today formed after 1880, when eastern European migrants arrived and many stayed rather than sailing on. The diamond trade concentrated in a few streets beside the central station, and it suited a community whose members could work in a business conducted on trust between people who knew each other, without machinery or premises.
After 1945 that community was rebuilt by survivors, and Hasidic groups established institutions there in numbers unusual for western Europe: several courts with their own synagogues, Yiddish speaking schools, kosher supply and a visible street presence. Antwerp is one of very few European cities where a Hasidic quarter functions as a quarter rather than as a remnant.
The wartime record is severe. Belgian Jews were assembled at a transit barracks at Mechelen, between Antwerp and Brussels, and deported from there to Auschwitz; roughly half of Belgium's Jewish population did not survive, and the Antwerp community lost a larger share than Brussels because it was more concentrated and more easily identified.
A contemporary question concerns religious slaughter. Flanders legislated in 2017, with effect from 2019, to require stunning before slaughter, which both Jewish and Muslim communities challenged as a restriction on the practice of their religion. European and Belgian courts upheld the measure, and the argument about how far animal welfare law may constrain religious obligation continues.