In 1996, a routine excavation in the city of Lod uncovered a portion of an elaborate mosaic from the 3rd or 4th century CE. Archaeologists came across other sections in the ensuing years and, after extensive restoration efforts, have recently returned it to its original location, where a special museum has been built to house it. Amanda Borschel-Dan, who calls it “one of the most beautiful treasures of Roman-era Holy Land,” writes:

Made up of several panels, the Lod mosaic is some seventeen meters long and nine meters wide—approximately 180 square meters in area (some 1,940 square feet). Among the colorful illustrations found on the mosaic are boats with oars, and animals including elephants, lions, birds, fish, and crustaceans. There are also plant life and flowers, vases, and geometric patterns.

The combination of mosaics, artifacts, and architectural evidence such as frescos from the late-3rd and early 4th-century Roman period uncovered in the excavations provides evidence of Mediterranean luxury that characterized the Roman empire, said the Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist Amir Gorzalczany, who directed one of the excavations following the discovery of a new section.

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.”