Ignorant Jews claim the Holocaust was unique. By various estimates, it devoured about a third of the world’s Jewry, including many Christianized Jews, whether formally converted or assimilated into the Christian culture. We have experienced similar catastrophes at least thrice: in the Babylonian onslaught, the Judean War, and the Bar Kochba Revolt, and in the century leading to the Spanish expulsion. Probably, we lost a similar proportion of people or more during the Maccabee civil war, the Black Death pogroms, the Cossack massacres, and perhaps other instances.

Take the well-documented Spanish expulsion, for example. Like both Temple destructions, it took place around the ninth of the month of Av, though the date might be prompted to Ferdinand’s court by one of the many Jewish anti-Semites at its service. Just like the Holocaust, the expulsion occurred after huge numbers of Jews had converted to Christianity: some falsely, others not. Just like in the Holocaust, the Jews of Spain refused move to Jerusalem, although the Egyptian Mamluk rulers welcomed them. Spanish Jews, initially proud fighters who served in the army and bravely resisted Christian mobs, gradually succumbed to living in fear and constant pogroms, and hardly resisted new repressions, similarly to Germany in the 1930s. The Spanish king briefly considered retracting the Edict of Expulsion for a bribe of 600,000 golden crowns, and so did the Germans when they were weighing the fate of the Hungarian Jews. The expulsion, with the resultant deaths and conversions, devastated the largest Jewish community on earth, which by some accounts contained the majority of the world’s Jews.

Still, in every case Jews survived and rebounded. We forced Spain to recognize Israel recently—in 1986—and on the Holocaust Remembrance Day we descend on Auschwitz. God needs his people, but he is never tired of punishing them back into being his.

The situation in Israel smacks of being a turning point: like before every catastrophe, Jews are concentrated, vulnerable to attacks by our enemies, and in fact we continually suffer these attacks. Though they live in Israel, Jews refuse to settle in the Promised Land of Judea, and neglect to realize the promise of making a Jewish state. Jews quickly assimilate and succumb to Christian media and public opinion just as they succumbed to Christian friars in Spain. We can bring the final Messiah, but we’re bringing yet another catastrophe.