‘Can you imagine what it must have been like having him for a father?” asked one of the writers for the Jewish Forward newspaper after an editorial dinner with Benzion Netanyahu. Mr. Netanyahu’s son, Benjamin, had recently been elected prime minister of Israel, and we’d all been expecting expressions of paternal pride. Instead, the elder Netanyahu bluntly voiced doubt that his son was tough enough to lead the Jewish state.

That was back in the late 1990s. It was the only meal I ever had with Benzion Netanyahu, who died Monday at the age of 102. But I have often thought of the writer’s question. Clearly Netanyahu’s formula for fatherhood was successful. One of his sons, Jonathan, led—and gave his life in—the 1976 hostage-rescue raid on Uganda’s Entebbe airport that inspired the world. Another, Ido, is a physician and playwright. And the voters of Israel lifted up Benjamin Netanyahu to prime minister not once but twice.

The thing to remember is that Benzion Netanyahu played his own role in the history of Israel and America, and he did something transcendent. He taught with particular clarity one of the hardest and most important truths that every Jewish person has to learn, namely that anti-Semitism is not about Jewish behavior. He exposed his own facet of this truth by the noblest methodology—scholarship. He pored through the pages of history to disclose the facts of the Spanish Inquisition.

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