This week’s parsha contains a strange, almost incomprehensible law:

Remember what the Amalekites did to you along the way when you came out of Egypt. When you were weary and worn out, they met you on your journey and attacked all who were lagging behind; they had no fear of God. When the Lord your God gives you rest from all the enemies around you in the land He is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the name of Amalek from under the heaven. Do not forget. (Deut. 25:17-19)

The Israelites had two enemies in the days of Moses: the Egyptians and the Amalekites. The Egyptians enslaved the Israelites. They turned them into a forced labour colony. They oppressed them. Pharaoh commanded the Egyptian people to drown every male Israelite child. It was attempted genocide. Yet about them, Moses commands: “Do not despise an Egyptian, because you were strangers in his land.” (Deut. 23:8)

The Amalekites did no more than attack the Israelites once — an attack that they successfully repelled (Ex. 17:13). Yet, Moses commands:, “Remember.” “Do not forget.” “Blot out the name.” In Exodus, the Torah says that “God shall be at war with Amalek for all generations” (Deut. 17:16). Why the difference? Why did Moses tell the Israelites, in effect, to forgive the Egyptians but not the Amalekites?

The answer is found in the Mishna, Avot (5:19):

Whenever love depends on a cause and the cause passes away, then the love passes away too. But if love does not depend on a cause then the love will never pass away. What is an example of the love which depended upon a cause? That of Amnon for Tamar. And what is an example of the love which did not depend on a cause? That of David and Jonathan.

When love is conditional, it lasts as long as the condition lasts — but no longer. Amnon loved, or rather lusted, for Tamar because she was forbidden to him. She was his half-sister. Once he had his way with her, “Then Amnon hated her with intense hatred. In fact, he hated her more than he had loved her.” (2 Sam. 13:15). But when love is unconditional and irrational, it never ceases. In the words of Dylan Thomas: “Though lovers be lost, love shall not, and death shall have no dominion.”

The same applies to hate. When hate is rational, based on some fear or disapproval that — justified or not — has some logic to it, then it can be reasoned with and brought to an end. But unconditional, irrational hatred cannot be reasoned with. There is nothing one can do to address it; it always persists.

That was the difference between the Amalekites and the Egyptians. The Egyptians’ hatred and fear of the Israelites was not irrational. The Egyptians feared the Israelites because they were numerous. They constituted a potential threat to the native population. Historians tell us that this was not groundless.

Egypt had already suffered from one invasion of outsiders — the Hyksos, an Asiatic people with Canaanite names and beliefs, who took over the Nile Delta during the Second Intermediate Period ancient Egypt. Eventually, the Hyksos were expelled, and all traces of their occupation were erased. But the memory persisted. It was not irrational for the Egyptians to fear that the Hebrews were another such population. They feared the Israelites because they were strong.

There is, however, a difference between “rational” and “justified.” The Egyptians’ fear was, in this case, certainly unjustified. The Israelites did not want to take over Egypt. To the contrary, they would have preferred to leave. Not every rational emotion is justified. The point is simply that rational but unjustified emotion can, in principle, be cured through reasoning.

Unlike the Egyptians, the Amalekites attacked the Israelites when they were “weary and weak”. The Amalekites focused their assault on those who were “lagging behind,” who posed no danger. This was irrational, groundless hate.

Irrational hate has no cause and no logic — therefore, it may never go away. The hatred symbolized by Amalek lasts “for all generations.” All one can do is to remember and not forget, to be constantly vigilant, and to fight it whenever and wherever it appears.

There is such a thing as rational xenophobia. In the hunter-gatherer stage of humanity, it was vital to distinguish between members of your tribe and those of another tribe. There was competition for food and territory. It was not an age of liberalism and tolerance. The other tribe was likely to kill you or oust you, given the chance.

The ancient Greeks were xenophobic, regarding all non-Greeks as barbarians. Even people as tolerant as the British and Americans were historically distrustful of immigrants, be they Jews, Irish, Italian or Puerto Rican. What happens, though, is that within two or three generations the newcomers acculturate and integrate. They are seen as contributing to the national economy and adding richness and variety to its culture. When an emotion like fear of immigrants is rational but unjustified, eventually it declines and disappears.

Antisemitism is different from xenophobia. It is the paradigm case of irrational hatred. In the Middle Ages, Jews were accused of poisoning wells, spreading the plague, and — in one of the most absurd claims ever, the Blood Libel — of killing Christian children to use their blood to make Passover matzah.

The European Enlightenment, with its worship of science and reason, was expected to end all such hatred. Instead, it gave rise to a new version of it: racial antisemitism. In the nineteenth century Jews were hated because they were rich and because they were poor; because they were capitalists and because they were communists; because they were exclusive and kept to themselves and because they infiltrated everywhere; because they were believers in an ancient, superstitious faith and because they were rootless cosmopolitans who believed nothing.

Antisemitism was the supreme irrationality of the age of reason.

It gave rise to a new myth, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a literary forgery produced by members of the Czarist Russia secret police toward the end of the 19th century. It held that Jews had power over the whole of Europe.

The situation in which Jews found themselves at the end of what was supposed to be the century of Enlightenment and emancipation was stated eloquently by Theodor Herzl, in 1897:

We have sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the national communities in which we live, seeking only to preserve the faith of our fathers. It is not permitted us. In vain are we loyal patriots, sometimes superloyal; in vain do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellow citizens; in vain do we strive to enhance the fame of our native lands in the arts and sciences, or her wealth by trade and commerce. In our native lands where we have lived for centuries we are still decried as aliens, often by men whose ancestors had not yet come at a time when Jewish sighs had long been heard in the country. … If we were left in peace .. But I think we shall not be left in peace.

This was deeply shocking to Herzl. Yet no less shocking has been the return of antisemitism to parts of the Middle East and even Europe today. Yet the Torah intimates why: irrational hate does not die.

Not all hostility to Jews, or to Israel as a Jewish state, is irrational. But some of it is. All we can do is remember and not forget, confront it and defend ourselves against it.

Amalek does not die. But neither does the Jewish people. Attacked so many times over the centuries, we still live, giving testimony to the victory of the God of love over the myths and madness of hate.

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