The Hungarian Jewish novelist György Spiró’s Captivity tells the tale of a Roman Jew named Uri who travels to Jerusalem as part of an official delegation. To Wesley Hill, the novel lacks literary sophistication but makes up for this deficiency with large doses of historical erudition and excitement—and a deftly executed appearance by Jesus, with whom the protagonist briefly shares a cell in Pontius Pilate’s prison:

Uri is less a three-dimensional person than a vehicle for Spiró to demonstrate his dizzying knowledge of 1st-century Jewish life and his knack for narrative cliffhangers. Uri’s trek from Rome to Jerusalem and Alexandria and back to Rome is a curio cabinet displaying Bildungsromanische baubles. . . .

At times, Spiró’s improbably broad reading seems to serve cliché: Uri encounters multiple luminaries of the ancient world, arriving at historical hinge points just long enough for Spiró’s lens to render a cameo. These cameos provide little new insight into any of the famed Jewish or Greco-Roman personages who cross paths with Uri at multiple junctures—with perhaps one exception. . . .

[B]y having Uri articulate [his rejection of Christianity] only after his return to Rome—after his tour through the pluriform Jewish communities of Judea, after his exposure to the shimmer of Alexandria’s temples and the treasures of its library, and after his eyewitness experience of that city’s frenzied pogrom in 38 CE—Spiró makes clear that his “Jesus novel” is something subtler than a picaresque with cameos. Spiró has plotted a kind of not-“Jesus novel,” in which Jesus is one more all-too-human victim of the world’s insatiable need to make messiahs of its heroes and of the world’s concomitant, relentless persecution of the Jews. To boot, it’s the most enjoyable swashbuckling-Jews-with-swords and not-“Jesus novel” likely to be written for a very long time.

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.