The oldest extant illuminated manuscript of the Haggadah—the odd title derives from its drawings of humans with the heads of birds—has been in the possession of the Israel Museum for seven decades, and normally goes on display around Passover. But it came to the museum under irregular circumstances, and now Eli Barzilai, whose German-Jewish grandparents possessed the manuscript when the Nazis came to power, is seeking restitution. The Associated Press reports:

Written in southern Germany around 1300 by a scribe identified only as Menaḥem, the Bird’s-Head Haggadah has long been a riddle. . . . Much of the enigma surrounds its strange illustrations of Jewish figures. [The scholar Marc Michael] Epstein believes the heads on the figures are those of griffins, beloved mythical creatures, and the drawings were meant to offer a positive representation of Jews while skirting a biblical prohibition against depicting human likenesses.

Barzilai says the 14th-century Haggadah was a wedding gift from his grandmother’s family to his grandfather, Ludwig Marum, a lawyer from the German town of Karlsruhe who served in Germany’s parliament and opposed Hitler. The Nazis paraded Marum and other opponents across town before taking them away. Marum was later killed at the Kislau concentration camp.

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.