Reviewing a new Berlin museum named after the industrialist, philanthropist, and art collector James Simon (1851-1932), along with a biography of his friend, the Jewish activist Paul Nathan (1857-1927), Abigail Green considers both their careers and the elite segment of Germany Jewry to which they belonged. Simon acquired a vast collection of Renaissance art and German art from all periods and brought some of the most celebrated artifacts of ancient Babylonia and Egypt to his country, turning Germany’s museums, the recipients of his benefactions, into major centers of European culture. As Green notes, the Rothschilds did something similar for France, as did Ludwig Mond, another Jewish industrialist, for Britain. This raises a relevant question:

Did the Jewishness of these men matter? They would undoubtedly have hated to think that it did. Men like Simon, Mond, and Edmond de Rothschild chose to give to great national museums because they identified with Germany, Britain, and France—and because they valued the prestige that came through association with these institutions: it symbolized, among other things, a precious kind of acceptance.

Nor was their generosity uncontroversial. Back in the early 1900s, anti-Semitic voices did not hesitate to denounce Wilhelm von Bode, the Berlin museum director with whom Simon worked closely for decades, for cultivating a clique of Jewish donors to whom he extended cultural respectability and commercial opportunities. The idea of belonging to a specific category of “Jewish patron” would have been abhorrent to these men. (Historians, of course, may well conclude that this is precisely what they were.)

Yet Simon was also not indifferent to Jewish causes, helping to finance the now-distinguished technical university in Haifa and the Aid Organization of German Jews, which he picked Nathan to lead. And Nathan, too, like his patron, was reluctant to think of himself as a Jew above all else:

Nathan was a liberal political journalist who made a second career as a Jewish diplomat. . . . He played a key part in the international struggle against anti-Semitism and internationally coordinated efforts to relieve the crisis faced by Russian and Polish Jews in an age of pogroms, war, and revolution. Yet he was also a central player in the left-liberal milieu of Wilhelmine Germany.

Nowadays, historians are aware principally of his humanitarian activities. . . . But the truth is that Nathan’s liberal activism came first: only once he recognized that a parliamentary career was impossible and that the political journal to which he had dedicated his life was failing did he devote himself full time to Jewish activism and diplomacy.

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.