On the first day of the holiday of Shavuot, which begins Tuesday evening, the passage in the book of Exodus that includes the Decalogue will be read in synagogues. While in many communities it is customary for the congregation to stand when the Ten Commandments are declaimed, ancient and modern rabbis have objected to this practice. Gil Student explains why:

At one point, some Jews had a custom of reciting the Ten Commandments as part of their daily prayers. Sectarians claimed this indicated a preference for this particular passage and a rejection of others as originating from a human rather than a divine author. In Israel [and Babylonia] during the 3rd century . . . this practice was rejected [by the talmudic sages] because of their concern over this sectarian argument against the sanctity of the [entire] Torah. . . . .

Who were the sectarians who believed that the Ten Commandments came from God but not the rest of the Torah? The great historian [of ancient Judaism] Geza Vermes suggests that they were Jewish Gnostics. Another scholar suggested to me that they were Marcionites, an early Christian sect who rejected the Hebrew Bible. Even in later centuries, after the Jewish Gnostics and the Marcionites were merely a footnote in history, the prohibition [against standing] remained in effect.

The same rationale was applied by later rabbinic authorities to discourage the practice of standing for the reading of the Decalogue. Arguing that it is worthwhile to follow this ruling even after its polemical purpose has become moot, Student notes that it is not only a reaction to heresy but a way of underscoring the fundamental dictum that all the Torah’s verses are equally holy, even—to use the Talmud’s example—the obscure genealogies found in the book of Genesis.

Commenting on the hearings of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday about anti-Semitism on college campuses, and the dismaying testimony of three university presidents, Jonah Goldberg writes:

If some retrograde poltroon called for lynching black people or, heck, if they simply used the wrong adjective to describe black people, the all-seeing panopticon would spot it and deploy whatever resources were required to deal with the problem. If the spark of intolerance flickered even for a moment and offended the transgendered, the Muslim, the neurodivergent, or whomever, the fire-suppression systems would rain down the retardant foams of justice and enlightenment. But calls for liquidating the Jews? Those reside outside the sensory spectrum of the system.

It’s ironic that the term colorblind is “problematic” for these institutions such that the monitoring systems will spot any hint of it, in or out of the classroom (or admissions!). But actual intolerance for Jews is lathered with a kind of stealth paint that renders the same systems Jew-blind.

I can understand the predicament. The receptors on the Islamophobia sensors have been set to 11 for so long, a constituency has built up around it. This constituency—which is multi-ethnic, non-denominational, and well entrenched among students, administrators, and faculty alike—sees Israel and the non-Israeli Jews who tolerate its existence as an affront to their worldview and Muslim “identity.” . . . Blaming the Jews for all manner of evils, including the shortcomings of the people who scapegoat Jews, is protected because, at minimum, it’s a “personal truth,” and for some just the plain truth. But taking offense at such things is evidence of a mulish inability to understand the “context.”

Shocking as all that is, Goldberg goes on to argue, the anti-Semitism is merely a “symptom” of the insidious ideology that has taken over much of the universities as well as an important segment of the hard left. And Jews make the easiest targets.