In 1497, Portugal began the forced conversion of its Jewish population, which included large numbers of Jews who had fled there after their expulsion from Spain five years earlier. Thousands of Jews were massacred or deported and many more converted, leading to the establishment of the Portuguese Inquisition, which sought to stamp out real or imagined cases of the secret practice of Judaism among converts and their descendants. Under these circumstances, the survival of the Abravanel Bible in the library of the University of Coimbra—an institution founded in central Portugal in 1290—is quite remarkable. Cnaan Liphshiz writes:

[T]he handwritten Bible from the 15th century is perfectly preserved. The book is filled with drawings on parchment that are so vibrant they seem to have been recently created. The Abravanels—a distinguished, wealthy family with branches in Spain and Portugal that fled to Amsterdam and the Balkans during the Inquisition—commissioned twenty such Bibles. The volume in Coimbra is among the best preserved of the handful whose whereabouts are known today. . . .

The University of Coimbra has little information on how exactly it came to possess the Abravanel Hebrew Bible, possibly because it was hidden or scrubbed from the library’s indices to hide it from Inquisition agents. . . .

Thanks to the university’s undocumented policy of subterfuge against the Inquisition—its librarians essentially hid many books that censors would likely have wanted to destroy, reintroducing them to the indices only after the Inquisition was abolished in 1821—Coimbra was in possession of a collection of rare, pristine Jewish manuscripts found nowhere else.

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.