There is a tragic similarity in the psychology of collective accusation.

When Nicholas Kristof paints Jews as uniquely bloodthirsty, uniquely indifferent to suffering, or uniquely responsible for every death in a complicated war, he participates in an ancient instinct: the need to turn Jews into a moral monster large enough to absorb the world’s rage. The language may wear the suit and tie of humanitarian concern, but underneath it lives the old medieval poison — the belief that Jewish power is uniquely sinister, uniquely corrupting, uniquely illegitimate.

What makes Kristof’s rhetoric so poisonous is not merely that it is dead wrong, but that it drags an ancient moral sickness into a modern newspaper costume and calls it conscience. To smear Jews collectively is bad enough; to dress that smear up as concern, to launder accusation through the language of virtue, is a deeper disgrace. It is the old blood libel with better tailoring. The setting has changed, the vocabulary has changed, but the instinct is the same: take a whole people, flatten their humanity, and present suspicion as if it were wisdom.

And yet the hypocrisy does not stop there. The same kind of collective indictment, the same lazy moral vandalism, appears inside Israel itself, where ultra-Orthodox factions too often speak as though the........

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