Written in the city of Würzburg in 1271 and 1272, the Worms maḥzor (High Holy Day prayer book) gets its name from the city that housed it for most of its existence—which was also home to one of the three original communities of Ashkenazi Jewry. The illuminated manuscript, now on display at the National Library of Israel, is written mostly in Hebrew, but contains the oldest extant example of the Yiddish language in the form of a brief prayer for whoever brings it to synagogue. Ilan Ben-Zion writes:

The prayer book, with its medieval European cityscapes, bird-headed humans, and menagerie of beasts, was used by the Worms Jewish community for centuries, up until the rise of Nazi Germany in the 20th century. . . .

[The curator Yoel] Finkelman said the Yiddish inscription is not only an important glimpse of the language in its early form but also suggests to historians that “beautiful maḥzorim were owned by individuals and used by communities, unlike today where the synagogue owns the siddurim.” A family might own a [regular] prayer book, but a tome of this size would cost “a flock of sheep and a year’s worth of scribal work and decoration,” making it more than most people could afford. . . .

The early glimpse of the Yiddish language in its infancy [found in the maḥzor] is extremely rare. “You have to realize that after this inscription from 1272, we have to make a leap of 110 years till the next dated document in Yiddish, that is 1382,” said Avraham Novershtern, [a leading expert on the history of Yiddish], referring to the Cambridge Codex, a Yiddish text found in the Cairo Geniza. . . .

The Worms synagogue was destroyed in Kristallnacht in 1938, ending centuries of the maḥzor’s use on Jewish holidays.

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.