The baroque theories of anti-Semites often link Jews to the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and other favorite subjects of conspiracists. The Boston rabbi Marvin Antelman was not the first Jew to promulgate such ideas, but he may have been the only one to use them to detect a plot to undermine Orthodox Judaism from within. Zvi Leshem writes:

In his work Antelman, who also held a PhD in chemistry, painted a detailed conspiracy theory incorporating the Jewish Enlightenment, Reform Judaism, and Communism, tracing their origins back to the [17th-century] false messianic movement of Shabbtai Zvi, his Polish successor Jacob Frank, the Illuminati, and the Jacobins [of Revolutionary France].

Here is where Gershom Scholem, the preeminent scholar of the Sabbatean movement, enters our story. Antelman [cites] him regarding the possible influence of Sabbateanism on the development of the Jewish Enlightenment and Reform Judaism, but goes well beyond Scholem’s suggestion of a possible cultural influence; Antelman lunges into a . . . conspiracy theory so complex as to be beyond the scope of this article.

Antelman eventually went on to serve as “chief justice” of the “Supreme Rabbinical Court of America” that he founded. Among the more dramatic acts of the court was the excommunication of the American secretary of state Henry Kissinger in 1976.

Among Scholem’s papers are several letters from Antelman along with his 1974 book, To Eliminate the Opiate: The Frightening Inside Story of Communist and Conspiratorial Group Efforts to Destroy Jews, Judaism, and Israel—in which Scholem wrote, in English, “Nonsense based on me!!!”

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.