Ten years ago, researchers discovered in the Vatican archives a rare manuscript of Benedict Spinoza’s Ethics, which had come into the possession of the Roman Inquisition in 1667 because of its theologically suspicious content. While the Church banned the book much as, decades earlier, the Amsterdam Jewish community had expelled the philosopher for his unorthodox opinions, the 18th-century German intellectual Novalis would later proclaim Spinoza “a God-intoxicated man.” In England, Spinoza’s work would later appeal to the secular proto-Zionist novelist George Eliot as well as the religious conservative Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Comparing the reactions to, and media coverage of, the recent attack on a Texas synagogue to the deadly 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Bari Weiss observes the disturbing trend whereby some anti-Semitic violence counts more than others. She recalls the muted reaction to a 2019 shooting at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City that left three dead—and whose perpetrators also attempted to bomb a ḥasidic elementary school.