For the first century-and-a-half of academic Jewish studies, scholars approached the Talmud armed primarily with knowledge of Judaism and of Greco-Roman antiquity. Such knowledge is undoubtedly necessary for studying the Mishnah (the older stratum of the Talmud) and the Jerusalem Talmud, both of which were produced in Roman-ruled Palestine. But the far more significant Babylonian Talmud reflects the teaching of rabbis who lived in Persian-ruled Mesopotamia during the 3rd through 6th centuries, a place where the dominant religion was Zoroastrianism and the literary language Persian. The late Yaakov Elman, an Orthodox Jew who had been a meteorologist, bookseller, and publisher before turning to fulltime scholarship, rought knowledge of this period in Iranian history to the study of Talmud. Shai Secunda reminisces about Elman, who died last month at the age of seventy-four:

While [Elman’s] early work was strictly philological and focused on topics such as the relationship between the early rabbinic compilation known as the Tosefta and the Babylonian Talmud, he moved on ingeniously to combine Iranian and talmudic studies in a hybrid that became known as Irano-Talmudica. Elman was the not the first scholar to realize that studying Babylonian Jewry’s Persian context could illuminate the Babylonian Talmud, but he is the one who built it into a real movement of flesh-and-blood people from different fields. . . .

Yaakov began this Irano-Talmudic stage of his career at age fifty, on a fellowship at Harvard. There he befriended professor Oktor Skjærvø, a tall, wry Norwegian master of Indo-Iranian languages. Oktor and Yaakov . . . soon became inseparable, spending many hours each day studying Middle Persian in Skjærvø’s large, book-lined office. Occasionally attending faculty parties in the evening, they appeared as the ultimate odd couple. . . .

Traveling the world for Jewish and Iranian studies conferences, Yaakov became a tireless evangelist for reading the Talmud alongside Middle Persian texts, regularly launching into detailed discussions of Zoroastrian law and describing it, to the astonishment of many, as “halakhic,” “rabbinic,” and “strikingly parallel” to Jewish law. . . . The tiny field of Old Iranian studies, which had been languishing due to lack of interest, gained tremendously from the sudden, unexpected infusion of these Talmud scholars.

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.