The Torah states on four occasions that the shekel, a standard weight or coin of silver, is equivalent to twenty gerah, the latter being a smaller measurement. Elsewhere, in the book Deuteronomy, it states, “Thou shalt not have in thy bag diverse weights, a great and a small,” that could be used for deceiving customers. A recent discovery brings together these two edicts, as Aryeh Savir writes:

Israeli archaeologists digging in the City of David in Jerusalem’s Old City came upon an extremely rare finding from the days of the First Temple—a biblical weight called a gerah that was probably used by a cheater [who lived around] 589 BCE.

The weight is made of reddish limestone, smoothed and well-polished, and on its upper part appear two deeply engraved straight, parallel and thick lines, indicating a weight of two gerah, or 0.944 grams. However, when weighed, the researchers were surprised to find that it weighed 3.61 grams—more than three times its expected weight.

Only one other gerah weight was discovered in Israel.

Prime Minister Varadkar’s meretricious messaging concerning the freeing of a kidnapped child is only one example of the Irish government’s perverse reaction to Hamas’s assault on Israel. Varadkar has accused the IDF of pursuing “something approaching revenge” in Gaza, and compared the Israeli war effort to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. His parliament, meanwhile, came close to expelling the Israeli ambassador. Terry Glavin writes:

In a recent interview, . . . the retired Irish diplomat Niall Holohan put it this way: “We feel we have been victimized over the centuries. It’s part of our psyche—underneath it all we side with the underdog.” But there’s something else in the Irish psyche that’s impolite to mention in the comfy Dublin pubs and bistros. . . . Not a few of Ireland’s gallant and celebrated champions of the underdog, its heroes of Irish freedom, were vulgar anti-Semites and Nazi collaborators.

And in recent years, Irish Jews are commonly baited, harassed, and badgered every time there is some eruption in Israel involving Palestinian “resistance.”

The republican pamphleteer Arthur Griffith approved [of anti-Jewish agitation in Limerick in 1904], calling Jews “usurers and parasites.” Griffiths was one of the founders of Sinn Féin, in 1905, and he served as Sinn Féin’s president in 1911.

There was always a deep division in the Irish nationalist movement between Irish republicans who felt an affinity with the Jews owing to a shared history of dispossession and exile, and Catholic extremists who ranted and raved about Jews. Those Catholic shouters are still abroad, apparently unaware that for half a century, Catholic doctrine has established that anti-Semitism is a mortal sin.