This month, Mosaic has offered a series of essays on Christian attitudes toward Judaism and the Jewish state. David Berger, the foremost authority on Jewish-Christian polemic in the Middle Ages, tackles Jews’ attitudes towards Christians in this interview with Elliot Resnick—among many other topics. He begins with the opinions of Rabbi Yeḥiel of Paris, whose disputation with a Catholic clergyman in 1240 was followed by the mass burning of Jewish religious texts:

Jews [involved in disputations] may have said things they didn’t mean in order to avoid persecution. . . . In Rabbi Yeḥiel’s disputation, he says the Talmud’s laws [prohibiting certain forms of intercourse with] non-Jews don’t apply to Christians. They only apply to the [pagan] nations of antiquity. [As in other cases], the question of Yeḥiel’s sincerity has been raised.

But Rabbi Menaḥem Meiri of Perpignan (1249-1315), who did not have a disputation with Christians, actually says the same thing even more vigorously and systematically. He says these laws don’t apply to umot g’durot b’darkhey ha-datot, which literally means “nations who are limited by the ways of religions”—that is, nations that have decent moral codes and believe in one God. So that means Christians and Muslims are exempted.

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.