Reading the Passover Haggadah at the Seder the other night, I broke involuntarily into laughter at one point. It was a seemingly odd place to do it at, for it came in the middle of the hi sheamda, the passage that goes, wine cups raised as it is recited:

“It is this [promise of God to safeguard Israel] that has sustained our ancestors and us, for not just once have there been those who arose to destroy us; rather, in every generation there are those who arise to destroy us, but the Holy One, praised be He, saves us from their hands.”

I suppose I wouldn’t have laughed had we at the Seder table not been singing this passage to its traditional Israeli tune, which is delivered in a brisk and lively allegro. Ela she-bekhol dor va’dor — “Rather, in every generation” — the voices go merrily soaring at this point — amdu aleynu lekhaloteynu — “there are those who arise to destroy us.” To judge by the gleeful melody, we might have been singing about the soup with matso balls that would soon be put before us. Questioning looks were sent my way.

“What is it with us?” I said. “The more people are out to destroy us, the happier it makes us.”

It did seem funny at that moment.

Indeed, we are sometimes a funny people, we Jews. To our credit, let it be said that we realize this more than do our enemies. That’s what Jewish humor is all about.

But do we really enjoy the thought of having enemies that much? And what about the opposite argument — the one that holds that Jews can’t bear the thought of having enemies at all, which is why so many of them blind themselves to reality and keep thinking that if only they were nice to everyone, everyone would be nice to them?

Or are there two different kinds of Jews, one that is flattered by having enemies and one that is not?

Certainly, if one looks at the enemies Jews have made (and there has been no lack of them), there is much to be flattered by. One needn’t go all the way back to the Pharaohs. Just think of our own times: Nazism. Soviet Communism. Radical Islam. Needless to say, these ideologies have had other bêtes noirs, too. Yet Jews — or “Zionists,” as the case may be — have played a disproportionate role in the demonology of all of them. The ugliest political movements of modernity have been, or have become (though some started out, as did Communism, with numerous Jewish adherents), obsessively anti-Semitic. Jews have every reason to feel proud of being hated by them.

There are, of course, different ways of explaining why they have been. Basically, these boil down to two.

The first explanation holds that political anti-Semitism has little to do with who Jews are in themselves. Anti-democratic political movements, it is said, need scapegoats and Jews have always been handy targets, in part because they are a small and politically vulnerable people, in part because long centuries of Christian and Muslim prejudice against them have made it easy to stir up feelings against them. If it weren’t the Jews, it would be someone else — but it often is the Jews, because no one else is as convenient.

The second explanation holds that anti-Semitism has a great deal to do with who Jews are in themselves. There is, it is said, something about them that rubs certain kinds of people the wrong way. Although what this “something” is, is debatable — it has been variously defined as Jewish nonconformism, Jewish innovativeness, Jewish curiosity, Jewish clannishness, Jewish aloofness, Jewish stubbornness, Jewish skepticism, Jewish cosmopolitanism, Jewish intelligence, Jewish commercial skills, Jewish competitiveness, and Jewish proteanism, to name but a few qualities that have been associated with Jews — it has invariably been perceived as a threat by all those who believe in closed, regimented societies that seek to impose monolithic standards of thought and behavior on their members.

Which of these explanations is the right one? Probably, both. They are not, after all, mutually exclusive. Jews are easy to scapegoat and Jews have had, historically, qualities that many people find annoying. What Jews can take comfort in is the thought that, for the most part, the people most annoyed by them are those who tend to be most rigidly opposed to anyone who doesn’t think or act the way they do. Jews have always been a good litmus test of a society’s tolerance for difference.

It is no fun having enemies, especially if they are the kind given to proclaiming their intention to destroy you and if they may be capable one day of acting on their intentions. But it is nothing to be ashamed of, either. “Tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are,” is an old adage. Enemies are every bit as good an indicator.

As a Jew, I wouldn’t count too much on God’s promises. We’ve been let down by them before. But a sober gaiety in the face of our enemies is perhaps not such a bad attitude. We’ve had to deal with Ahmadinejads and Nasrallahs in the past and we’ll presumably have to deal with them again in the future. Whether through no fault of our own or through some feature of our being, they’re attracted to us. The thought of us gives them no peace. We should take it as the honor that it is.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.