Until the expulsion of its Jews in 1493, Sicily—then a Spanish province—was very much at the center of Jewish life in Italy. Afterward, many Jews who had undergone conversion to Christianity in order to remain in Sicily continued to practice their religion in secret. Some of their descendants today recall nominally Catholic family members preserving such Jewish customs as lighting candles on Friday evening. On January 12—the anniversary of the expulsion—the city of Palermo opened a synagogue, the island’s first in a half-millennium. Rossella Tercatin writes:

The first traces of Jewish presence in Sicily date back to the 1st century CE, and in the 15th century there were already between 25,000 and 40,000 Jews living on the island, spread out over dozens of communities—more than in the numerous states and kingdoms on the Italian peninsula combined. . . . Five-hundred years [after Judaism was outlawed], many Sicilians have started to figure out the origin of their apparently bizarre family customs and are interested in learning more. National and international Jewish organizations have come to help. . . .

Every year on January 12, a conference is held in Palermo on a topic related to the Jewish history of Sicily. . . . [At this year’s conference, in] the presence of a small but passionate group of Jews, the archdiocese of the city donated the building of the Oratory of Santa Maria delle Grazie al Sabato to the Jewish community. . . .

“The facility is located in the complex of the monastery of San Nicola da Tolentino, at the heart of the ancient Jewish neighborhood, where the synagogue used to stand,” explains the former chief rabbi of Naples, Pierpaolo Pinhas Punturello, who is deeply involved with Palermo’s Jewish community. “The great scholar Obadiah of Bertinoro called it ‘the most beautiful in Europe’ when he visited it in 1487.”

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder and supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, issued a fatwa (religious ruling) in 1989 calling for believers to murder the novelist Salman Rushdie due to the content of his novel, The Satanic Verses. Over the years, two of the book’s translators have been stabbed—one fatally—and numerous others have been injured or killed in attempts to follow the ayatollah’s writ. Last week, an American Shiite Muslim came closer than his many predecessors to killing Rushdie, stabbing him multiple times and leaving him in critical condition. Graeme Wood comments on those intellectuals in the West who have exuded sympathy for the stabbers:

In 1989, the reaction to the fatwa was split three ways: some supported it; some opposed it; and some opposed it, to be sure, but still wanted everyone to know how bad Rushdie and his novel were. This last faction, Team To Be Sure, took the West to task for elevating this troublesome man and his insulting book, whose devilry could have been averted had others been more attuned to the sensibilities of the offended.

The fumes are still rising off of this last group. The former president Jimmy Carter was, at the time of the original fatwa, the most prominent American to suggest that the crime of murder should be balanced against Rushdie’s crime of blasphemy. The ayatollah’s death sentence “caused writers and public officials in Western nations to become almost exclusively preoccupied with the author’s rights,” Carter wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times. Well, yes. Carter did not only say that many Muslims were offended and wished violence on Rushdie; that was simply a matter of fact, reported frequently in the news pages. He took to the op-ed page to add his view that these fanatics had a point. “While Rushdie’s First Amendment freedoms are important,” he wrote, “we have tended to promote him and his book with little acknowledgment that it is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated.” Never mind that millions of Muslims take no offense at all, and are insulted by the implication that they should.

Over the past two decades, our culture has been Carterized. We have conceded moral authority to howling mobs, and the louder the howls, the more we have agreed that the howls were worth heeding. The novelist Hanif Kureishi has said that “nobody would have the [courage]” to write The Satanic Verses today. More precisely, nobody would publish it, because sensitivity readers would notice the theological delicacy of the book’s title and plot. The ayatollahs have trained them well, and social-media disasters of recent years have reinforced the lesson: don’t publish books that get you criticized, either by semiliterate fanatics on the other side of the world or by semiliterate fanatics on this one.