In Jonathan Levi’s Septimania, the protagonist, Malory, discovers himself to be descended from the rulers of a short-lived 8th-century Jewish kingdom in southwestern France. (Septimania was in fact a medieval principality with a significant Jewish population.) The author, writes Michael Weingrad, “whips history, mathematics, politics, music, theater, and religion into his soufflé,” not to mention a 17th-century parallel plotline involving Isaac Newton and, above all, the story of Malory’s love for the beautiful Luiza. In his review, Weingrad concludes that the book, while succeeding as a love story, fails to live up to its own ambitions:

Septimania . . . gestures throughout at real-world history, politics, and ideas, and here the book is mushy. The problem is not just the occasional over-prettiness, though at least some of the magic on offer in Levi’s novel is the glamor of a certain kind of wealth and cultural capital. . . . The real issue is that, while Septimania presents itself as a novel of ideas, it’s really a novel of just one. As Malory learns, the book’s big themes, from Newtonian physics to Islamist jihad, are in the end all just fragmentary gropings after the One True Answer revealed at the book’s conclusion: Love. “Newton was looking, as Malory was looking,” writes Levi, “as perhaps the rocks, planets, the stars, the oranges on the branches of the trees of the Giardino degli Aranci were looking—they were all looking for sympathy. For sympathy. For love.”

Now maybe the oranges in Rome are looking for love, and maybe they’re not, but there is a difference between aesthetics and history, and Septimania lyrically blurs the two rather than tracing the true edge between them. One also notices the absence of any mention of Israel, curious in a Mediterranean-spanning novel that is so concerned with Jewish kingdoms, history, and searches for home. . . . In Septimania . . . the king of the Jews jets from England to Italy to New York, but does not bother with the most intricate, enchanting, and, yes, cosmopolitan Jewish kingdom that includes the cities of present-day Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

But that is to push the novel where it does not want to go.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.