A rare Hebrew edition of the Tanakh, printed in Frankfurt in 1677, has recently been acquired by the University of Haifa, donated by the family of the late Israeli filmmaker Micha Shagrir. Laura Geggel writes:

David Clodil (1644-1684), a renowned German Lutheran [scholar], wrote a commentary for the book, and produced and edited it for his academic audience. Clodil included Hebrew numbers, as well as Arabic numerals, to help his readers navigate the text. . . .

The story [of the book’s recovery] began in 1977, a month after then-Egyptian president Anwar Sadat visited Israel. Shagrir said that he and a group of Israelis made a secret trip to Egypt, and happened to visit an antique bookstore in Cairo during their stay. The owner of the store wasn’t Egyptian, but Armenian. He recognized Shagrir, and told the filmmaker he admired a film Shagrir had produced about the Armenian genocide.

To show his thanks, the shopkeeper gave Shagrir a wrapped book, and asked him not to open it until he had returned to Israel. Shagrir agreed, and was shocked to find the antique Tanakh when he opened the package.

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.