In the imagination of the world, there could be nobody more Jewish than the ultra-Orthodox. With their black hats, sidecurls and frock coats, they are taken as the very epitome of the culture. That is why their radical fringes are appropriated by Israelophobes seeking a cover for their bigotry, as if suffering a cartoonish Jewish ally is a price worth paying to evade charges of antisemitism.

Tens of thousands of young men devote their lives to taxpayer-funded study while their secular compatriots place their lives on the line

This week, pictures of such apparently devout Jews clashing with Israeli police were seized upon as another opportunity to delegitimise the state of Israel. Look, the bigots said with some glee, the real Jews are being attacked by the dastardly Zionists. Without much knowledge of that closed community, its location within the Israeli cultural landscape and the reason for the outbreak of violence, non-bigots could only watch in bewilderment. With its Pride celebrations, Eurovision songs and Miami-style beaches, Israel can often feel very accessible. But this could not be more of a mystery. What was going on?

I grew up in a mild corona of the ultra-Orthodox community, known simply as ‘Orthodox’. Somewhere, my mother has a photograph of me on my barmitzvah smiling sheepishly beneath the brim of a black trilby. I left that world when I was 17 and after a few years of meandering, found a way of expressing Jewishness that feels to me more authentic.

The early Zionists rejected the ultra-Orthodox way of life. The Israelites in the Bible were a proud people, masters of their own kingdom with both swords and books never far from their side. They were Spartans and Athenians rolled into one, a Bronze Age tribe that inspired millennia of culture on which western civilisation is based.

After the Jews were exiled from their homeland 2,000 years ago, however, their culture degenerated into a feeble bookishness that lived or died on the whim of kings and emperors and was unable to muster any kind of self-defence when the mob came to their doors. By the 19th century, the new Zionist movement proposed a return to the Israelite culture of the Bible. Tales of pogroms in which religious men had their throats slit while clinging to........

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