Although he had a low opinion of the Jewish religion, the third president of the United States was passionately committed to religious freedom, and on multiple occasions spoke up for the rights of Jews. He even endeavored to study the Talmud, as Saul Jay Singer writes:

Jefferson . . . had limited contact with Jews; and his knowledge of them was essentially limited to what he had learned from studying the Bible. Nonetheless, he manifested extreme sensitivity to the Jewish condition.

In a famous letter to Joseph Marx, a prominent Jewish merchant who helped to found Richmond’s first synagogue, he . . . stated his belief that the reading of the King James Bible in public schools was a “cruel addition to the wrongs” that Jews had historically suffered “by imposing on them a course of theological reading which their consciences do not permit them to pursue.” . . .

[H]owever, Jefferson simultaneously held Judaism itself in low regard. . . . [He] was deeply troubled that the Jewish God was “a being of terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust.”

After the Library of Congress was burned down by the British during the War of 1812, Jefferson offered his entire eclectic collection of books, some 6,487 volumes which he had spent over 50 years accumulating, as a replacement. . . . One of those books was [an edition of the talmudic tractate] Bava Kamma (Leyden, 1637), containing the Hebrew text, its Latin translation, and a commentary by the prominent Dutch Hebraist Constantin L’Empereur, in which Jefferson inscribed his initials at pages 65 and 145.

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.