A tomb on the Mount of Olives has long been venerated by Jews as the resting place of the biblical prophetess Hulda. Christians and Muslims, however, worship there for their own reasons, as Miriam Feinberg Vamosh writes (free registration required):

King Josiah, the Israelite leader from 641 to 609 BCE, aspired to purge the land of idol worship, after his own grandfather Manasseh had permitted idolatrous worship in the Temple. Josiah ordered the Temple renovated for proper worship of the one God, during which a scroll—ancient even then—with Deuteronomic texts was found.

The star prophet of the time, Jeremiah, was apparently out of town. But Hulda, wife of Shallum, one of the king’s courtiers (and, the sages suggest, Jeremiah’s cousin), was available for interpretation. She warned Josiah that, indeed, the punishments [for idolatry] listed by the book would apply, though only after Josiah’s time, because he was righteous. Her warning led the Jews to renew their covenant with Yahweh.

Hulda’s tomb may have been located within Jerusalem at one point and later removed. . . . [B]y the Middle Ages, Jewish pilgrims write that they had visited Hulda’s tomb at the top of Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives. . . . But to Christians, this very same tomb is occupied by St. Pelagia, a 5th-century actress and singer from Antioch known for her beauty who, at the behest of her bishop, St. Nonnus, left her old life behind, disguised herself as a man, and came to Jerusalem where she lived alone in a monastic cell and died in 457 CE. . . .

Moving onto Muslim tradition, this is the tomb of Sit Raba’a al-Aduwiyyeh. She was born a slave in Basra, Iraq, in the year 714. According to the story, when her master saw a golden halo surrounding her as she prayed, he decided to free her.

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.”