Reflecting on the fact that the recent shooting at the Poway synagogue occurred on the final day of Passover, Dara Horn writes:

The Bible’s famous call for freedom is “Let my people go.” But in the Bible, these words are nearly always followed by another phrase: “so they may serve Me.” The only purpose of this freedom is to enable the people voluntarily to accept divine laws—laws about welcoming strangers, loving one’s neighbors, and accepting responsibility for creating a civic society of mutual obligation. For a nation of former slaves, this was terrifying. Suddenly these people discovered that freedom requires hard work: building a community, supporting the vulnerable, respecting others, educating children. . . .

Since ancient times, in every place they have ever lived, Jews have represented the frightening prospect of freedom. So long as Jews existed in any society, there was evidence that it in fact wasn’t necessary to believe what everyone else believed, that those who disagreed with their neighbors could survive and even flourish against all odds. The Jews’ continued distinctiveness, despite overwhelming pressure to become like everyone else, demonstrated their enormous effort to cultivate that freedom: devotion to law and story, deep literacy, and an absolute obsessiveness about transmitting those values between generations. The existence of Jews in any society is a reminder that freedom is possible, but only with responsibility—and that freedom without responsibility is no freedom at all.

People who hate us know this. You don’t need to read the latest screed by a hater to know that unhinged killers feel entitled to freedom without any obligations to others. The insane conspiracy theories that motivate people who commit anti-Semitic violence reflect a fear of real freedom: a fondness for tyrants, an aversion to ideas unlike their own and most of all, a casting-off of responsibility for complicated problems. None of this is a coincidence. Societies that accept Jews have flourished. Societies that reject us have withered, fading into history’s night.

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.”