In the past few months, Israeli archaeologist have carried undersea excavations in the Mediterranean. Ynet reports on their recent discoveries:

The Israel Antiquities Authority said in the underwater dig off the Caesarean coast they found hundreds of silver coins from the 13th to 16th centuries, along with silver and bronze coins from the Roman period. The affluent central Israeli town inherits its name and much of its territory from the ancient city of Caesarea Maritima, which was built by Herod the Great roughly between 25 and 13 BCE as a major port.

The findings also include a bronze figurine that looks like an eagle, which was the symbol of the Romans, a pantomime mask from the Roman theater, and bronze bells that were used to scare away evil spirits. These items were most likely on [two] ships that sunk some 1,700 years and 600 years ago, [respectively].

The wrecked ships also had rare personal items of people who were on them but did not survive. Among other things, a red gemstone was uncovered, designed to be set on a ring, and on the top side of it, a musical instrument was carved, known as the harp of David in the Jewish tradition. Another artifact that was found was a thick gold ring, shaped in an octagonal form, with a green gemstone, on which a young boy, a shepherd, dressed in a tunic, with a deer or sheep on his shoulders is carved. This image, of the Good Shepherd, is known in ancient Christian art as a symbol of salvation.

In 2001, in the immediate wake of al-Qaeda’s attacks on America, Jonathan Rosen was asked to write something about anti-Semitism. So many of the points he raised in the resulting essay, reproduced in full at the link below, ring true today, and make clear just how predictable so much of the global reaction to October 7 has been. Rosen reflects on what he wrote then from the standpoint of 2024:

It is worth remembering that the Nazis saw the Holocaust as self-defense, though Jews were a minuscule fragment of a giant militarized nation. This was irrational, of course, even as they spoke the language of science, redefining Jews as a biological menace, like a virus, making the murder of babies and the elderly necessary, too, because like a microbe only extermination was the cure. It was the existence of Jews that made them a provocation, just as the existence of Israel, in any borders, inspired the Hamas massacre, as its 1988 covenant, never revoked, makes abundantly clear. The towers were a similar provocation.

It was back in 2001 that Rosen found himself “awakened to anti-Semitism,” as he wrote at the time:

I am not being chased down alleyways and called a Christ-killer. . . . But in recent weeks I have been reminded, in ways too plentiful to ignore, about the role Jews play in the fantasy life of the world. Jews were not the cause of World War II, but they were at the metaphysical center of that conflict nonetheless, since the Holocaust was part of Hitler’s agenda and a key motivation of his campaign. Jews are not the cause of World War III, if that’s what we are facing, but they have been placed at the center of it in mysterious and disturbing ways.

I felt this in a different form reading coverage of Israel in European papers. Though public expressions of anti-Semitism are taboo in a post-Holocaust world, many Europeans, in writing about Israel, have felt free to conjure images of determined child killers and mass murderers. Earlier this year, the Spanish daily La Vanguardia published a cartoon depicting a large building labeled “Museum of the Jewish Holocaust” and behind it a building under construction labeled “Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust.”