While finding objects many hundreds of years old is not uncommon in the Jewish state, a recent discovery by archaeologists nonetheless stands out. The Times of Israel reports:

A rare, 1,850-year-old bronze coin depicting the Roman moon goddess Luna was recently found off the coast of Haifa, the Israel Antiques Authority (IAA) said Monday. The coin shows Luna above a depiction of the zodiac sign Cancer. On the other side of the coin is the head of the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius, during whose reign (138–161 CE) it was minted.

Like his predecessor Hadrian, Antoninus is known to historians of Rome as one of the “five good emperors” under whose watch there was little corruption or internecine disorder. But unlike Hadrian, who subjected the Jews to some of the bloodiest and most destructive persecution in the empire’s history, Antoninus secured a positive reputation in Jewish memory:

Antoninus’ reign was the quietest of the Roman empire, coming at the height of the period of the Pax Romana, or Roman peace, and Antoninus himself was not from the military, was never in battle, and never even left Rome.

“During his rule, the empire’s relations with the Jews were greatly improved, the [anti-Jewish] decrees of Hadrian were revoked, and Jews were allowed to practice circumcision,” the IAA said.

“These steps led to amicable relations between the emperor and Rabbi Judah the Prince,” the statement said, referring to the 2nd-century CE rabbinic leader who composed the Mishnah.

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.”