The Canadian Jewish fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay recently published his fourteenth novel. In an essay on Kay’s oeuvre, Michael Weingrad notes many Jewish themes and occasional Jewish characters. These perhaps appear most explicitly in two of his books, which, like several others, are set in fictionalized versions of historical settings:

Kay makes use of a good deal of Jewish history in some of these novels, especially The Lions of Al-Rassan (1995), which is based in 11th- and 12th-century Spain and focuses on the interaction among Jews, Muslims, and Christians. He cites the great historian [of medieval Egyptian Jewry] S.D. Goitein in his acknowledgments, and, in the course of the novel, he quotes poems from the corpus of medieval Hebrew verse.

One notices that, unlike historical Jews, Kay’s Kindath, [the Jewish-like religious group in the novel’s world], have no concept of a Zion from which they came and to which they might one day return (or even visit as pilgrims). . . . So, while Kay draws from many of the rich, diasporic aspects of Iberian Jewish culture, a figure such as Judah Halevi, the great Hebrew poet of medieval Spain who yearned for Zion, is not included. Tellingly, the center of Kindath culture is seemingly modeled on Ottoman Salonica, not Jerusalem.

[By contrast], his earlier novel Tigana (1990) is haunted by a Zionism that never becomes explicit. . . . The setting resembles fractious 16th-century Italy, though in this case one of the conquerors of the novel’s peninsula is a powerful sorcerer. In retaliation for the death of his son in battle against the rebellious republic of Tigana, this despot uses his magic not only to crush the population’s resistance but to eradicate its very name and memory. Only the survivors of the rebellion can recall their country. A spell prevents anyone else from believing that there ever was such a place as Tigana, which has been renamed after a rival state.

Does this not call to mind—despite its absence from Kay’s Afterword, [which notes several other historical events]—the Roman renaming of conquered Judea as “Palestine,” after the ancient Philistines? It may be going too far to suggest that Dianora, a woman from Tigana who winds up falling in love with her people’s enemy, has a name that sounds, appropriately, like the term for the dispersion of the Jews. But it does seem less than coincidental that the name of Devin Bar Garin, another of the Tiganans who awakens to his country’s erased history, recalls the first prime minister of Israel.

Much as the magic spell forces the people of Tigana to remain silent about their identity, [however], Kay remains silent about the concern with Jewish memory and identity that informs the thematic substratum of the novel.

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.