A year ago this March, a historic synagogue in the southeastern Australian city of Ballarat celebrated the completion of major renovations. Nomi Kaltmann explains how its history is intertwined with the mad rush for gold there nearly 200 years ago:

The synagogue proudly displays two sizable wooden plaques featuring the prayer for the queen’s well-being, one inscribed in Hebrew and the other in English, commemorating Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887.

Ballarat, located in the Australian state of Victoria, rose to prominence during the mid-19th century after gold was found there in 1851, igniting a gold rush; over the next year, the city drew approximately 90,000 people from around the world. At the peak of the gold rush, between 1852 and 1853, Ballarat stood as the world’s wealthiest alluvial goldfield.

The city attracted Jews from England who were seeking their fortunes as well as other European Jews who were escaping anti-Semitism. In 1853, a minyan was established on the Ballarat goldfields for the High Holy Days and by 1859, the town boasted a Jewish community with more than 300 men. In 1861 it consecrated its synagogue. . . . During the initial decade of the gold rush, a quarter of Ballarat’s shopkeepers were Jewish, among them, members of the Ballarat Synagogue.

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.”