Usually when this newsletter links to pieces about archaeology, they involve finds from ancient Israel. But there are also impressive and important discoveries being made at more modern sites. One is the 17th-century great synagogue in Vilnius (formerly Vilna), currently being excavated in a joint effort by the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Association of Lithuanian Archaeology. The Times of Israel reports:

Findings dated to the 17th and 18th centuries included parts of the synagogue’s women’s section, huge water basins used to ensure the purity of the synagogue’s ritual bath, or mikveh, and a giant pillar, now collapsed on its side, that stood near the synagogue’s bimah, a podium for Torah reading.

The new section uncovered by the archaeologists showed that the synagogue’s floor had been decorated with patterns of red, white, and black flowers.

The synagogue was burned during the Nazi occupation of Lithuania, between 1941 and 1944, and razed by Soviet authorities, who ruled Lithuania from the end of World War II until 1990.

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.”