JEWISH SENTINEL

JEWISH WORLD • FEBRUARY 11 - 17, 2022 27 America. NewYork Police Depart- ment data shows anti-Jewish hate crimes increased 51% in 2021 — with the total number of attacks nearly equaling anti-Asian and an- ti-gay-male hate crimes combined. American-Jewish communities have been forced to deploy armed security since the October 2018 at- tack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, where 11 Jewish worshippers were shot and killed, as well as the April 2019 Poway at- tack in California, where one Jew- ish woman was killed. Jews are facing anti-Semitism from three directions. First, from the far-right, neo-Na- zis, white supremacists and ul- tra-nationalists form a brand of anti-Semitism that gets widespread coverage in the media. But anti-Semitism also comes from the Left, with rising woke neo-orthodoxy driving some Di- versity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) efforts to erase Jews as minorities. The Heritage Foundation recently published the Diversity Delusion report on DEI officers in Ameri- ca’s premier academic institutions, detailing extraordinary levels of anti-Semitism expressed by lead- ing DEI officers at the nation’s top universities. Because of fears of being la- beled Islamophobic, the vehicle of Islamist anti-Semitism is in play. Islamism, masquerading as the great monotheism of Islam, is an artificial 20th-century totalitarian ideology that steals the language and metaphors of Islam but holds at its core a cosmic enmity with all matters pertaining to Jewry, Juda- ism, Zionism and Israel. This fanaticism drove “Lady Al Qaeda” to whom the Colleyville hostage-taker referred. Bizarrely, due to the deterrent of Islamopho- bia, the media referred to her as a “Pakistani neuroscientist,” rather than a federally convicted terrorist. While the family of the Col- leyville terrorist has said he was mentally disturbed, and the FBI has since corrected its initial denial that anti-Semitism was a motive in the act, there is no denying the iconic symbol of religious Jews at worship as a target of lethal anti-Semitism. The hostage-taker’s targeting of Jews at worship, his desire to speak to and seek the release of one of the most iconic female ji- hadist terrorists ever convicted and his articulated desire to meet his death suggest that he was exposed to, and indoctrinated by, jihadist ideology, which appeals to the dis- enfranchised. As if all that weren’t bad enough, the pandemic has become a vehicle for digital anti-Semitism for some who claim vaccination and virus conspiracy theories, suggesting that the pandemic is part of a “Jew- ish plot,” with vaccination devel- opments enriching Jews. Digital anti-Semitism is rapid- ly gaining new adherents. Recent reports reveal all nine major so- cial-media platforms, including YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, not only carry anti-Semi- tism but rapidly propagate it. Anti-Semitism is traveling at speeds not seen in recent years and mutating at a rapid rate. The attempt to erase Jews is repeating itself. Sadly, we have seen this movie before. Qanta A. Ahmed, MD, is a mem- ber of the Committee Combatting Contemporary Anti-Semitism at the USC Shoah Foundation and a Senior Fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum. Anti-Semitism continued from page 11 Many progressives categorize Jews as ultra-white, at the top of the privilege chain. White supremacists have different ideas. The weather also put obstacles in the traveler’s way: “The roads were ruined by so much rain,” he noted, although he added that he enjoyed the beauty of the sea – known today as Lake Kinneret. “The sea is wide and its water is good to drink. There are many date trees there.” Tiberias’ markets were also favorably men- tioned: In them, he found “wool and linen fabrics, vegetables, all kinds of foods and fruit.” Bassola wrote of his trip to Safed in great detail. “This is one of the most important and interesting texts about tzaddikim’s graves in the Land of Israel,” Dr. David says. “Part of his writing was meant to encourage and serve as a guide to Jewish im- migrants and pilgrims to this land.” One entry describes the hilula (revelry) around the grave of Rab- bi Shimon Bar Yochai at Mount Meron, where Bassola went with a guide. “I rode with a Jew to go on a tour to see the Upper Galilee and the tzaddikim there,” he says. “Bassola has left us a fascinating document attesting to his visits to some two dozen sites, in which, ac- cording to early Jewish traditions, and to a large extent Muslim ones as well, the graves of prophets and other biblical figures are located,” David adds. “He doesn’t make do with a brief description of the places he visited, but devotes an interesting geographic description to each one.” Regarding the Safed site, that meant information about the topography, the structure of the graves and tombs, the vegetation and folkloric traditions. As with Tiberias, Jerusalem is described by Bassola as “in ruins and deserted.” To mark the destruc- tion of ancient Jerusalem, he tore his clothes and wept for the city, although he conceded that “a little of its beauty is still perceptible.” Among the holy and historic sites he saw were the Western Wall – of which he wrote: “the stones are significant in their size and age”– as well as the burial places of the kings, and of the prophets Zecha- ria and Haggai and the prophetess Hulda, on Mount Zion; landmarks including the Temple Mount and its Al Aqsa Mosque; the cave of Jewish studies at the Hebrew Uni- versity and whose specialty is He- brew manuscripts – among them Bassola’s travelogue. In addition to his spiritual roles, Bassola was also a banker, a liveli- hood that apparently enabled him to travel to foreign lands. Among his famous contemporaries were Michelangelo; Leonardo da Vinci; Martin Luther, the founder of Prot- estantism; King Henry VIII; Span- ish conqueror Hernán Cortés; and the astrologer-seer Nostradamus. Bassola’s journey to this part of the world took place in a dramatic period of history. “His is the first description of the Land of Israel after the Turks took control of it,”Yaari writes in his 1976 book Land of Israel: Journeys of Jewish Immigrants from the Mid- dle Ages to the Beginning of the Re- turn to Zion (in Hebrew). Shimon the Tzaddik; the Tower of David; and the pool of Shiloach. As to the location of the city’s Jewish community, the traveler wrote that it covered an area “from Mount Zion to near the Temple.” “That is, the area of the Jew- ish neighborhoods in our time,” says Dr. David. Its size: “like 300 households.” Its ethnic composi- tion: “Many Ashkenazim and Sep- hardim and mista’arvim (a term for Arab-speaking Jews of the ancient east) and Westerners (Jews from North Africa, referred to as west- ern Arab countries).” Bassola counted 745 Jewish families in the Land of Israel, mostly concentrated in Safed and Jerusalem. En route to the country, he saw other Jewish communities. Of that in Famagusta, Cyprus, he wrote: “the Jews there are few and mean, hatred and fighting among themselves, and most of them drink libations.” He cited the warm hospitality of the Jews in Sidon – “which is not the case in all the places I passed through.” One mystery remains in Bassola’s account, involving what may have been an exceptional climate event all those hundreds of years ago. While staying in the north of the coun- try, after making the pilgrimage to Safed, hearing tales of miracles that had supposedly taken place in the vicinity and even taking a dip in the lake, the Italian traveler arrived at the village of Biram, where he saw the remains of a small synagogue. “They told me,” he wrote, “that it is written upon a fallen stone there: ‘Don’t be astonished by the snow that falls in Nissan, we have seen it in Sivan’” – referring to the Hebrew months that correspond, respectively, with March-April and May-June. Perhaps the inscription Bassola described was a testament to snow falling in the Land of Israel in very late spring or early summer? Ofer Aderet is the history corre- spondent at Haaretz. All engraved landscapes in this article are from “Picturesque Pales- tine,” with drawings by Harry Fenn and John Douglas Woodward. Bassola continued from page 8 Tiberias. Jerusalem fromMt. Scopus. Hebron. journalist’s retweet of Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitic tweet defends her freedom to hate.