The Italian humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was among the first of many Renaissance Christian thinkers to become interested in Jewish mysticism. David Navarro reviews a recent collection of essays on the subject:

As a humanist, Pico was exposed to ideas about magic and astrology, both of which were mainstream subjects in natural philosophy. Kabbalah was one of the movements Pico became involved with in order to prove the truth of Christianity. His main contribution is “to have conveyed to the Christian world a specific interpretation of the Jewish Kabbalah, and have given rise to a real and proper independent discipline that many imitators would have rendered more distant from its Jewish origin.” . . .

[The scholar] Moshe Idel examines . . . the strategy applied by Pico to bend Christianity to some central aspects of Kabbalah. The different Jewish esoteric doctrines represented a challenge to understanding the core of Jewish mysticism, and spread through various Jewish mystics during the 15th century in the Italian kingdoms. Pico’s methods for combining the hermeneutic strategies he acquired from these different movements are explained [by Idel], showing his approach to the use of Kabbalah in order to prove Christ’s messianic role and “convince Jews as to the correctness of Christian theology.”

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.