“Nobody wants to be called anti-Semitic by anyone, particularly the president of their institution,” said Classics Department Chair Richard F. Thomas. “So the charge doubtless had a chilling effect, as is often intended by those who make the charge.”

Several professors said that criticism of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s policies does not amount to “singling out” Israel. Rather, the fact that the United States sends billions of dollars in aid to Israel each year “gives us not only the right but the moral duty to speak out,” Richard Wilson, the Mallinckrodt research professor of physics, wrote in an e-mail.

Some signers of the divestment petition also said that comparisons between Israel, apartheid South Africa, and even Nazi Germany, are perfectly legitimate.

John Womack Jr. ’59, the Bliss professor of Latin American history and economics, noted in an e-mail that prominent Jews—including Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt—made the same comparison to Nazism in 1948 when they denounced the Herut Party, the predecessor to current Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Likud bloc.

Several Jewish professors said they saw their support for the divestment petition as consistent with their religion.

“Some of us who are Jewish, and who care about the problem of anti-Semitism as much as President Summers does, believe that the best protection from discrimination against Jews is to defend absolutely, with passion and vigor, the rights of all people to be free from discrimination,” professor of Psychology Elizabeth S. Spelke ’71 wrote in an e-mail.

Despite the torrent of criticism from divestment backers, Harvard Students for Israel President Sunny Yudkoff ’06 offered support for Summers’ remarks.

“Larry Summers doesn’t believe he has to hide his Jewish identity in the public sphere by accepting hatred so commonplace in academia,” she said. “We are grateful for his being a voice of reason on this campus.”

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.