In his 2003 article “Conversion to Judaism in Classical Antiquity,” published in Hebrew Union College Annual, the classicist Louis Feldman analyzed the striking increase in the number of Jews between 586 BCE and the 1st century CE. He concluded that this was likely due to widespread, voluntary conversion to Judaism. In searching for clues as to the reasons behind this apparent trend, Pinchas Landis examines the legends of famous converts from antiquity, in both the Talmud and historical sources.

At the beginning of the first Jewish-Roman War in 66 CE, Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, known simply as Nero, was the emperor of Rome. It was he who sent Vespasian to put down the Jewish Revolt—the same Vespasian who, together with his son Titus, eventually conquered the country and destroyed the Second Temple.

Roman history records that, in 68 CE, a rebellion was mounted against Nero in Rome. He was declared a public enemy and sentenced to death by the Roman Senate in absentia. When Nero learned of his fate, he committed suicide.

Jewish [sources] tell a different story. The Talmud teaches that Nero came to Jerusalem during the war. In an attempt to see if fate would be on his side, he shot arrows in all four directions. All landed facing Jerusalem. In an attempt to explore further, he asked a Jewish child what verse in the Jewish Bible he was learning. The child responded by quoting the book of Ezekiel: “And I will lay My vengeance upon Edom by the hand of My people Israel.” [In talmudic literature, Edom is taken a stand-in for Rome.]

Nero concluded that “The Holy One, Blessed be He, wishes to destroy his Temple, and to wipe His hands with that man (referring to himself).” Nero then fled, and was so inspired by the pseudo-prophecy that he received that he converted to Judaism. The great Rabbi Meir, upon whose teaching much of the Mishnah is based, is said to be descended from him.

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.”