Born Shneur Zalman Rubashov in 1889, Zalman Shazar would serve in Israel’s first cabinet and later as the country’s president from 1963 until 1973. Shazar, however, was not a politician by calling but a historian, who studied under Simon Dubnov—then the dean of Russian Jewish historians—and later trained at German universities. His research on the disastrous career of the 17th-century false messiah Shabbetai Tsvi would inspire Gershom Scholem’s definitive studies. Stuart Schoffman revisits Shazar’s peculiar fascination with this historical figure:

Just as historians have begun to re-evaluate Ḥasidism, Rubashov declared [in a 1913 essay], they should appreciate the vital “sap” of Sabbateanism, its power to inspire the Jewish nation. . . . In 1924, Zalman Rubashov made aliyah. The next year, . . . he wrote an editorial entitled “Yom Shabbetai Tsvi,” [in which he argued that] if we Jews were fully rooted in our history, we would honor Shabbetai Tsvi on this, his 300th birthday. . . . Shabbetai built a “popular movement such as the diaspora had never known.” He “overcame the diaspora, vanquished the medieval nature of Judaism, and forced open the gates of a new Hebrew history.” He “struck new fire from the eternal rocks of religion, to redeem the people and the individual.”

In other words: the Great Pretender was a tragic Promethean hero who ignited an enduring revolution. Writing in Hebrew in secular Tel Aviv, Shazar boldly spun a messianic fiasco into a Zionist manifesto. . . .

Scholem delivered a tribute [to Shazar after his death in 1974]: “In a certain sense, it was Shazar’s personal tragedy that he was unable to fulfill his destiny as a historian. . . . The scholar and statesman within him strove to dwell together but could not find balance and compromise.”

I . . . beg to differ. Leafing through the Sabbatean studies of Israel’s third president, I hark back to his mentor Simon Dubnov, who wrote in 1893: “We recount the events of the past to the people, not merely to a handful of archaeologists and numismaticians. We work for national self-knowledge, not for our own intellectual diversion.” Some historians do it best on the page, others on the stage of Jewish history.

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.