In 1497, Portugal began the forced conversion of its Jewish population, which included large numbers of Jews who had fled there after their expulsion from Spain five years earlier. Thousands of Jews were massacred or deported and many more converted, leading to the establishment of the Portuguese Inquisition, which sought to stamp out real or imagined cases of the secret practice of Judaism among converts and their descendants. Under these circumstances, the survival of the Abravanel Bible in the library of the University of Coimbra—an institution founded in central Portugal in 1290—is quite remarkable. Cnaan Liphshiz writes:

[T]he handwritten Bible from the 15th century is perfectly preserved. The book is filled with drawings on parchment that are so vibrant they seem to have been recently created. The Abravanels—a distinguished, wealthy family with branches in Spain and Portugal that fled to Amsterdam and the Balkans during the Inquisition—commissioned twenty such Bibles. The volume in Coimbra is among the best preserved of the handful whose whereabouts are known today. . . .

The University of Coimbra has little information on how exactly it came to possess the Abravanel Hebrew Bible, possibly because it was hidden or scrubbed from the library’s indices to hide it from Inquisition agents. . . .

Thanks to the university’s undocumented policy of subterfuge against the Inquisition—its librarians essentially hid many books that censors would likely have wanted to destroy, reintroducing them to the indices only after the Inquisition was abolished in 1821—Coimbra was in possession of a collection of rare, pristine Jewish manuscripts found nowhere else.

For some time, opponents of U.S support for Israel have been urging the White House to end the war in Gaza, or simply calling for a ceasefire. Douglas Feith and Lewis Libby consider what such a result would actually entail:

Ending the war immediately would allow Hamas to survive and retain military and governing power. Leaving it in the area containing the Sinai-Gaza smuggling routes would ensure that Hamas can rearm. This is why Hamas leaders now plead for a ceasefire. A ceasefire will provide some relief for Gazans today, but a prolonged ceasefire will preserve Hamas’s bloody oppression of Gaza and make future wars with Israel inevitable.

For most Gazans, even when there is no hot war, Hamas’s dictatorship is a nightmarish tyranny. Hamas rule features the torture and murder of regime opponents, official corruption, extremist indoctrination of children, and misery for the population in general. Hamas diverts foreign aid and other resources from proper uses; instead of improving life for the mass of the people, it uses the funds to fight against Palestinians and Israelis.

Moreover, a Hamas-affiliated website warned Gazans last month against cooperating with Israel in securing and delivering the truckloads of aid flowing into the Strip. It promised to deal with those who do with “an iron fist.” In other words, if Hamas remains in power, it will begin torturing, imprisoning, or murdering those it deems collaborators the moment the war ends. Thereafter, Hamas will begin planning its next attack on Israel:

Hamas’s goals are to overshadow the Palestinian Authority, win control of the West Bank, and establish Hamas leadership over the Palestinian revolution. Hamas’s ultimate aim is to spark a regional war to obliterate Israel and, as Hamas leaders steadfastly maintain, fulfill a Quranic vision of killing all Jews.

Hamas planned for corpses of Palestinian babies and mothers to serve as the mainspring of its October 7 war plan. Hamas calculated it could survive a war against a superior Israeli force and energize enemies of Israel around the world. The key to both aims was arranging for grievous Palestinian civilian losses. . . . That element of Hamas’s war plan is working impressively.