As German Jewry underwent radical change beginning in the late 18th century—with the Jewish Enlightenment, the birth of Reform Judaism, the abandonment of Yiddish, and a transformation in Jewish legal status—many found a model to emulate in the Jews of medieval Spain, at least in the somewhat romanticized picture of them offered by early scholars of Jewish history. Among the effects of this trend was the construction of synagogues in the Moorish style. The grandest of these was the Neue Synagoge on Berlin’s Orienburger Strasse, which Lewis Carroll visited twice and described as “most gorgeous.” John Efron writes:

Beginning in the 18th century, with increasing fraternization between upper-class Jews and Christians and exposure to bourgeois tastes and sensibilities, Jews, long considered to be in religious error, came to believe that they were also in aesthetic error. In almost all corporeal and cultural categories, Jews found themselves to be deficient, occasioning among them a crisis of aesthetic confidence. . . . [This crisis] drew them to the Sephardim, whom they imagined as dignified, elegant, eloquent, and beautiful. . . .

Between the 1830s and 1860s, the advent of neo-Moorish synagogues, with their towering minarets, giant domes, polychrome exteriors, windows with Islamic-style arches, and stunningly ornate interiors were the most visible, indeed, the most spectacular manifestation of an imagined Sephardi aesthetic and the only one that was created in partnership with non-Jews—the architects, builders, city planners, and councils who approved such structures.

While there are neo-Moorish synagogues all over the world, what makes Germany the most important site for this architectural style is that it was the first place such synagogues were built, and secondly, that these were the only buildings in Germany [created in this style, which] almost all architects dismissed as suitable only for entertainment and recreational purposes. . . .

The [Orianburger Strasse] synagogue’s external centerpiece was an onion dome that soared majestically some 160 feet into the air. Wrapped in a blanket of zinc and swaddled in gold ribbing, crowned with a Star of David, the great dome was the brightest and most joyful architectural feature to be found anywhere in Berlin. It was also the tallest structure in the city. The central portal was flanked by towering minarets that borrowed heavily from North African mosques and from the Giralda, a late-12th-century minaret in Seville, while the crenellations were typical of those found on Cairene mosques.

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.