Even in ancient times, Jews were often associated with the practice of medicine, an association that persists in both the popular imagination and in reality to this day. Edward Reichman tells the story of the first European medical school to accept Jewish students, and their battles against the plague that swept through the continent in the 17th century:

The university of Padua was the first officially to open its doors to non-Catholics, including both Protestants and Jews. Other Italian universities accepted Jews during this period as well, though papal permission was usually required. Thus, it was primarily in Italy, and particularly in Padua, that the majority of Jewish physicians of the Renaissance trained.

By the early 1600s a steady stream of Jewish students [from both] local Italian communities [and] from abroad availed themselves of this unique opportunity. . . . Their special status as physicians often exempted them from wearing the required Jewish garb. [Yet] Jewish physicians were largely confined by law to treating their fellow Jews. Only on rare occasions could one obtain special papal dispensation to treat non-Jewish patients as well.

Reichman zeroes in on four Jewish graduates of the Padua medical school whose careers, fortuitously well documented, placed them on the frontlines of the battle against the plague that struck Italy in 1631. Among them was one Clemente Caliman Kalonymus Cantarini, born in 1593 into a distinguished Paduan Jewish family:

[O]n July 8, 1631 Caliman’s father Shimon died from plague, to be followed by his uncle Menaḥem on July 22. Caliman himself would succumb to the disease only eight days later. He died on July 30, 1631, at age thirty-eight. His life and death are memorialized in the plague diary of Abraham Catalano, [himself a physician and one of the heads of Padua’s Jewish community]. Other Cantarini family members are also accounted for in the diary. Caliman lost two other brothers to the plague. . . . Three of Caliman’s brothers in Padua survived, and one . . . was in Venice during the outbreak and unaffected.

Caliman battled the plague, sacrificing his life in the process leaving no direct descendants.

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.