In northern Azerbaijan, not far from the Russian border, lies the town of Krasnaya Sloboda, whose residents are almost exclusively “Mountain Jews”—indigenous Caucasian Jews who speak their own language, related to Persian. Thanks to the presence of a Chabad-Lubavitch emissary from Israel, the community has experienced a religious revival, but its numbers are dwindling as younger people move to Russia in search of economic opportunity. Lee Gancman writes:

The town itself was founded as a haven for Jews in 1742 by Fatelli Khan, the Muslim emir of the [adjacent] town of Quba, located in a relatively flat area just south of the modern-day border with the Russian province of Dagestan. While the rugged and remote area to the north had served as a haven for Jews for centuries, a period of unrest beginning in the 18th century saw local Sunnis turn on their Jewish counterparts and send them fleeing.

“At the time there was much persecution of Mountain Jews, and one Jewish town was burned down,” explains Alexander Murinson, a faculty member at Bahçeşehir International University and expert on Caucasian Jewish communities. . . .

While for a time in the mid-20th century the town was considered by some to be the largest all-Jewish settlement outside the land of Israel, numbers have since dwindled from an estimated peak of 18,000 to . . . around 1,000 permanent residents.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.