In his recent book Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion, Daniel Boyarin gives a historical account of the term “Judaism” and concludes that Jews had no word equivalent to it before the modern period. Boyarin therefore argues that, “from a linguistic point of view, only modern Judaism can be said to exist at all,” and that scholars who speak of ancient or medieval Judaism are engaging in an unscholarly anachronism. In her review, Adele Reinhartz writes:

[Boyarin’s] iconoclastic claim . . . is based on an a-priori principle: that we “should not ascribe to a culture a category or abstraction for which that culture does not have a term.” [But] Boyarin does not provide any support for this a-priori principle. . . . [I]t is by no means obvious that the absence of a word denotes the absence of a concept. . . . Linguists and cognitive psychologists have long agreed that the relationship between language and concept is far more complex than Boyarin would have us believe. Research in these fields confirms what common sense suggests: it is eminently possible for us to have concepts without words to denote them. . . .

[For instance], there are words in other languages that, though absent from English, nevertheless describe feelings or ideas with which we are very familiar. . . . The . . . Scottish word tartle refers to that panicky hesitation just before you introduce someone whose name you can’t quite remember—a situation that most people have experienced at one time or another. . . .

Boyarin’s theoretical framework [also] presumes that the main function of words like “Judaism” or “religion” is to denote a concept. It is obvious, however, that words serve other purposes as well. . . . [W]hen we [scholars] refer to Second Temple Judaism, . . . we are not stating or assuming that, say, [the ancient Alexandrian Jewish philosopher] Philo’s goals or ideas were the same as those of the [apocryphal] books of Enoch, Tobit, or Judith, or the letters of Paul. But we can include them in the category of Second Temple Judaism when we want to gesture toward some things they had in common, such as a reverence for the Torah, the impulse to apply biblical texts to their own time and place, and an affiliation—even if troubled at times—with other Jews. . . .

[Lastly], without anachronism we cannot discuss such important topics as sexuality or identity, terms and concepts that are absent from premodern Jewish sources. How else could Boyarin and [his sometime co-author] Virginia Burrus refer to the rabbis as “resistant hybrid subjects,” a self-definition that would have had those same rabbis scratching their heads? Or write an article titled: “Apartheid Comparative Religion in the Second Century, in Theory and the Pre-Modern Text,” in which almost every word is anachronistic?

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.