Produced at the behest of Joseph Goebbels, the 1940 film Jud Süss expressed Nazi anti-Semitism at its most vulgar. It was a distorted version of the true story of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, who served as a “court Jew” to Duke Carl Alexander of Württemberg and was arrested immediately after the duke’s death and then executed. Yair Mintzker’s recent The Many Deaths of Jew Süss explores the conflicting accounts of Oppenheimer’s trial and last days. In his review, Jonathan Karp explains the often misunderstood role of the court Jew:

[The] phenomenon of the court Jew . . . had its roots in the 16th century and flowered in the period following the Thirty Years War. The proliferation of large and small states [in what is now Germany] after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, along with the war’s decimation of population and property, created an urgent need on the part of Central Europe’s new rulers for capital and credit. Jews, who had been excluded from most of Central Europe, . . . were now invited in small numbers to come back as creditors, financiers, ministers, crown merchants, and military suppliers.

They weren’t popular, which isn’t surprising given that they were now stigmatized both as aliens and as willing tools of new absolutist states which were seeking to bypass the fiscal authority of estates, guilds, and other traditional institutions. This made the court Jew and his retinue entirely dependent on the ruler’s protection—and uncertain continued favor. . . .

But Joseph Süss . . . stood out even in comparison [with his] wealthier and more powerful predecessors. . . . For one thing, during his rise [he] all but failed to pay the kind of lip service to traditional Jewish observance that the Jewish community expected of court Jews. Worse still, his aristocratic pretensions, numerous reported affairs, and overt political interventions threatened the fragile security of Württemberg’s fledgling Jewish population. In spite of these things, Oppenheimer’s refusal to renounce Judaism on the eve of his execution turned him into a genuine if unlikely martyr for some contemporary Jews.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.