This week, those who follow the daily regimen of Talmud study known as daf yomi completed Bava Metzia, perhaps the most studied tractate. It contains one of the most famous of all talmudic tales, in which Rabbi Eliezer summons miracles to convince his colleagues that his opinion on an issue of ritual law is correct—and still loses the argument. David Bashevkin seeks to interpret this story in its wider context:

Most of Tractate Bava Metzia centers on the principles that establish ownership: the muhzak, the person who currently has possession of the item in question; methods of acquisition of an object; and the different evidentiary rules required to establish who owns what.

Yet, upon closer examination, this story [of Rabbi Eliezer’s dispute] reframes the central theme of ownership that occupies our tractate: who owns the Torah? Like the [disputed garment with which the tractate begins], the traditions of the Torah are held by two parties: God and the Jewish people. . . . The Jewish people, however, are the muhzakim of Torah—the Torah is not in heaven, it is in our possession.

For much of Jewish history, the Jewish people, like Rabbi Eliezer, looked upward for prophetic revelation to know the proper way forward. . . . Rabbinic law, however, is built on the central idea that even after the destruction of the Temple, even after the explicit divine voice has been muted, God has not abandoned the Jewish people—God speaks through the Jewish people. The collective body of the Jewish people still possesses the divine word. Now however, the divine voice no longer emanates from the heavens—the Torah is not in heaven—but through the interpretive community of the Jewish people.

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.”