Mandy Patinkin said something imprecise, frightening, and partly true in The New York Times. Speaking of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, he argued that it was endangering the State of Israel and Jews around the world. The response came quickly. Unpacked accused him of victim-blaming, of giving antisemites a free pass, of engaging in Holocaust inversion. The reply had its own force. Antisemites are responsible for antisemitism. A man who attacks a synagogue does not acquire innocence because a foreign government behaved badly. Hatred does not become clean because it has found a newspaper headline to hide behind.

Patinkin was not wrong to notice danger traveling outward from state action. Unpacked was not wrong to insist that pretext is not cause. The historian’s irritation begins where both arguments start using old categories too quickly. Consequence is not guilt. Explanation is not absolution. Criticism of a government is not automatically an indictment of a people. Protection of a people is not automatically a defense of every act committed by a government that claims to protect them.

Medieval France supplies one older version of the trap. Jews were not persecuted because a particular Jewish resident of Blois, Troyes, Paris, or Rouen had personally caused Christian suffering. They were made answerable as a category. Jewish communities had existed in southern France since antiquity and spread widely through medieval France by the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, with open neighborhoods organized around synagogues, schools, ritual baths, and butcher shops. After the First Crusade massacres of 1096, their situation deteriorated into exclusion from professions, exorbitant taxation, defamatory badges, ritual-crime accusations such as Blois in 1171, the burning of Hebrew manuscripts under Louis IX, Black Death well-poisoning accusations, expulsions, confiscations, and the conversion of synagogues into churches. The category did the work. Jewishness itself became usable suspicion. That history does not mean government action is irrelevant to public danger. It means the person hurling a stone at a synagogue owns the stone, the arm, and the hatred, even when a government somewhere else has behaved with brutality, arrogance, or strategic........

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