The academic discipline of Jewish studies first came into being in the early 19th century, propelled by dissatisfaction with Gentile accounts of Judaism and Jewish history. For intellectual ammunition, the founders of the new discipline went to the archives: the collections of rare printed books and manuscripts of which an abundance existed in Germany. Ismar Schorsch tells how these collections came to be identified, catalogued, and studied:

We can pinpoint the year of birth [of academic Jewish studies] to 1818 with the appearance of a compact tract of some 30 pages entitled Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur. Its author was a brilliant twenty-four-year-old student at the newly founded University of Berlin incensed by the distorted views of Judaism of Friedrich Rühs, his professor of history, who had denounced in writing the recent partial emancipation of Prussian Jews. In protest, Leopold Zunz [1794-1886] dropped his class and set out to write a rebuttal dripping with sarcasm. To his credit, he soon abandoned the project, [choosing instead] to elevate the discourse with a sweeping conceptualization of what a genuinely historical study of Judaism would entail.

In an age when scholarship was embracing the critical study of every aspect of human culture, why, he asked, was Judaism still being dismissed by the unexamined, recycled claims of religious prejudice? Medieval Jews had produced works on astronomy, medicine, mathematics, geography, architecture, business, industry, music, and art. The term “rabbinic literature” completely obscured these secular interests and precluded understanding Judaism as a well-rounded cultural phenomenon. Zunz proposed instead the adjective “neo-Hebraic” (as opposed to biblical Hebrew) or simply “Jewish” to properly encompass the dynamic diversity of the literary corpus.

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.