The Hungarian Jewish novelist György Spiró’s Captivity tells the tale of a Roman Jew named Uri who travels to Jerusalem as part of an official delegation. To Wesley Hill, the novel lacks literary sophistication but makes up for this deficiency with large doses of historical erudition and excitement—and a deftly executed appearance by Jesus, with whom the protagonist briefly shares a cell in Pontius Pilate’s prison:

Uri is less a three-dimensional person than a vehicle for Spiró to demonstrate his dizzying knowledge of 1st-century Jewish life and his knack for narrative cliffhangers. Uri’s trek from Rome to Jerusalem and Alexandria and back to Rome is a curio cabinet displaying Bildungsromanische baubles. . . .

At times, Spiró’s improbably broad reading seems to serve cliché: Uri encounters multiple luminaries of the ancient world, arriving at historical hinge points just long enough for Spiró’s lens to render a cameo. These cameos provide little new insight into any of the famed Jewish or Greco-Roman personages who cross paths with Uri at multiple junctures—with perhaps one exception. . . .

[B]y having Uri articulate [his rejection of Christianity] only after his return to Rome—after his tour through the pluriform Jewish communities of Judea, after his exposure to the shimmer of Alexandria’s temples and the treasures of its library, and after his eyewitness experience of that city’s frenzied pogrom in 38 CE—Spiró makes clear that his “Jesus novel” is something subtler than a picaresque with cameos. Spiró has plotted a kind of not-“Jesus novel,” in which Jesus is one more all-too-human victim of the world’s insatiable need to make messiahs of its heroes and of the world’s concomitant, relentless persecution of the Jews. To boot, it’s the most enjoyable swashbuckling-Jews-with-swords and not-“Jesus novel” likely to be written for a very long time.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].