In the second half of the 19th century, as the majority of Russian Jews faced ever greater immiseration, some managed to benefit from rapid economic changes, and few even acquired fabulous wealth. The most famous to do so were members of the Gunzburg family, who played outsized roles in Russian-Jewish life until the Bolshevik revolution. Reviewing a recent book about the family, Josh Meyers writes:

It was in Kamenets-Podolsk, a city in [what is now] western Ukraine, that the family’s ascent truly began. There in 1849, the family patriarch Joseph Efzel purchased a concession from the state monopoly to produce and sell alcoholic beverages in southern Ukraine and Crimea. In normal times this was a lucrative business, and Joseph Efzel was good at it. Choosing to produce beer and mead over vodka (which sold for a higher price, but was also more expensive to produce), he brought in record profits, overcoming the low margins with massive market share.

Joseph Efzel’s investments made him extremely rich; they also brought him political influence. The Russian state depended on alcohol taxes to remain solvent—it is estimated that 40 percent of state revenues came from alcohol sales in 1860. As a good earner, Joseph Efzel became a key partner for the Russian Empire, an essential cog in the machinery of state. In 1849 Joseph Efzel was declared an “honorary citizen” as opposed to an imperial subject out of gratitude for his success.

In the 1860s, the tsar began a program of political and economic reform, which offered new opportunities for Jews in general, and the Gunzburgs especially:

Notably for the Gunzburgs, Russia . . . decided to allow private banking for the first time in its history. . . . The step into banking allowed the Gunzburgs to enter two new worlds. On one hand, Joseph Efzel gained permission to settle in St. Petersburg, outside the Pale of Settlement—roughly encompassing present-day Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, and parts of Lithuania and Latvia—to which Jews were legally confined. There, along with other members of the Russian Jewish elite, they built the first Jewish community in that city, including the building of the Grand Choral Synagogue. The family also expanded to Paris, where they built a mansion (which still stands today) on the fashionable Rue de Tilsitt.

The move to Paris and St. Petersburg opened up new cultural frontiers for the family. Russian and French replaced Yiddish, and artists and intellectuals entered the family’s orbit. Ivan Turgenev was a family friend. The family remained devoted to traditional Jewish religious practice, but with their own particular twist: Sabbath dinners were major affairs and the family prayed three times daily, but this did not stop the family from eagerly participating in the culture of balls and parties of Paris and St. Petersburg. On [holidays and the first day of the Hebrew month], when the Hallel prayer [Psalms 113-118] is recited, they hired a cantor who sang the prayer to the tune of Italian opera.

The Gunzburgs also remained devoted to Jewish philanthropy and communal leadership, even after they lost most of their fortune at the end of the century.

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.