When Cambridge University decided it had no use for the great physicist’s extensive non-scientific papers, it handed them over to Sotheby’s auction house. But on the day they were auctioned, in 1936, almost nobody showed up. Zachary Solomon writes:

[The very same day], down the street, Christie’s was holding an auction of their own for Impressionist art. In the end, only two people came for Newton’s papers. One of them happened to be the noted economist John Maynard Keynes. The other: a Jewish expert on Middle Eastern affairs named Abraham Shalom Yahuda. The two split the pot: Keynes took the alchemy writings, Yahuda the theology.

When Yahuda died in 1951, his collection transferred to the National Library of Israel. And what a collection indeed: featured among Newton’s papers are works on mysticism, exegeses, projections for the end of days (mark 2060 on your calendar), maps, and illustrations. The papers show his belief that secret knowledge was contained in talmudic descriptions of the Temple.

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.