The capital city of the Spanish island of Majorca was once home to a thriving Jewish community, many of whose members converted to Catholicism in 1492 when Spain officially expelled its Jews. In recent decades their descendants have been returning to Judaism, and now the island boasts a community of some 200 souls and a synagogue, as Ayelet Mamo Shay writes:

In 1435, Palma de Mallorca’s Jewish community included some 4,000 people. Over the years it thrived and prospered, until [1492]. The Jews who did not flee . . . converted to Christianity [but] continued to observe their religion secretly, as [did other] anusim [forced converts] in Spain. In Palma de Mallorca, they were called chuetas (from the Catalan word for pigs).

One the one hand, they couldn’t live as Jews, but on the other hand, the Christians refused to accept them and treated them with much disrespect. They were humiliated and considered members of the lowest class. They were only allowed to marry among themselves, so since 1691 to this very day they have only married other descendants of anusim. . . .

Ironically, the derogatory term chuetas has become a source of pride for the descendants of anusim who are discovering their roots and seeking to return to their forefathers’ religion. Today, there are 20 to 30 [such people] on the island who are studying Jewish religious laws on a monthly basis with Rabbi Nissan Ben Avraham, an emissary of the Shavei Israel organization, who returned to the Jewish religion himself after finding out that his own family had kept the secret for many years.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.