How did the menorah become one of the fundamental symbols of Jewish identity? This question and related ones are the subject of a new exhibition, titled The Menorah: Cult, History, and Myth, jointly held in Rome at the Vatican Museums and the Jewish Museum of Rome. Michael Frank relates some of the history:

Consider some of the most basic facts about the object, for starters. Why seven branches? [The ancient Roman-Jewish historian] Josephus mentions the planets (six in orbit around the sun); but there is also, he adds in a later passage, “the dignity of the number seven among the Jews”—derived from the six days of creation plus the Sabbath. Why lilies and pomegranates but no almonds? This would seem to be a confirmation that Moses’ menorah was, in fact, melted down after the destruction of the First Temple, and a new one, in a revised form, was fabricated later. Josephus describes the oil lamps lined up “in one row”; yet lampstands that were made around the time of Moses were more often arranged in three dimensions, with individual lights circling a single bowl. . . .

And then there is the fascinating puzzle of the menorah’s base. Josephus asserts that the Romans had modified it so that “its middle shaft,” he says in his account of the procession, “was fixed upon a basis.”

The menorah that was rescued from the Second Temple after it was set on fire by one of Titus’s soldiers—pointedly, the story goes, not by Titus himself, who was said to be against its destruction (see his troubled expression as depicted in two narrative paintings by Nicolas Poussin from the early 17th century)—stood up on a tripod, a detail confirmed by dozens of representations on view in these exhibitions. However, the menorah on the Arch of Titus is set in a hexagonal ferculum, or box, that was carved with animals and mythological creatures, in obvious defiance of the biblical injunction against graven images.

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.