Set in 1933, Cynthia Ozick’s newest short story tells of an ambitious young philologist named Solomon Adelberg, and his quest to uncover the secrets of a notorious Jewish apostate. Most of the action takes place in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, but the story begins at a remote monastery in Mandatory Palestine:

What he knew, what every linguistic adept knew, was that an unrecorded portion of Pablo Christiani’s writings had been sent here for safekeeping in the year 1265 by Pope Clement IV. Most were copies of official declarations, but some were purported to be clandestine and dangerous confessions.—Or were these hoary certainties no better than mere wishfulness?

Pablo’s history was fully preserved. Born into a pious Jewish family, he was a Dominican friar dedicated to the conversion of the Jews. He journeyed to all the synagogues of Aragon to harangue, and if that fell short, to coerce, and if that too appeared useless, to punish. He appealed to Clement to compel the wearing of the Jew-badge. He ordered the confiscation of Jewish books, most particularly the Talmud, to be burned to ash in great smoldering heaps. Confident of his own mastery of Jewish sources, he prevailed on King James of Aragon to sponsor a public disputation in the royal palace in the great city of Barcelona, under the scrutiny of the world: he alone would confound Moshe ben Nachman, the most eminent Talmudist of the age, second only to Maimonides, with proofs of the Gospels taken from the Talmud itself. But James judged the Jew the winner, and the next day Moshe ben Nachman, accused of blasphemy, fled for his life to Acre in the Holy Land. The pope was more powerful than the king, and Pablo had the ear of the pope.

Solomon dismissed all this. He scorned the stale stuff of encyclopedias. It was to the mazy byways of the unspoken mind of Pablo Christiani that he was drawn. He was after impulses, inducements, animating subterranean drives. A philologist must be an excavator. So he had learned from his teacher, his mentor, the sovereign of his thought: tread where no one else has trod. The library was no more than a filthy niche in an old stone wall, crusted with the dung of rodents and bats. The monastery itself was defunct. Its archives were choked by the smell and the spew of heedless decay—no roster or index hinted at what it might hold. Shells of ancient generations of dead insects crackled under Solomon’s soles. And his teacher too was dead.

Between the explosion of thousands of Hizballah pagers on September 17 and now, Iran’s geopolitical clout has shrunk dramatically: Hizballah, Iran’s most important striking force, has retreated to lick its wounds; Iranian influence in Syria has collapsed; Iran’s attempts to attack Israel via Gaza have proved self-defeating; its missile and drone arsenal have proved impotent; and its territorial defenses have proved useless in the face of Israeli airpower. Edward Luttwak considers what might happen next:

The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be maneuvered into fighting a war against Iran. . . . Obama started his tenure by apologizing for America’s erstwhile support for the shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then-president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.

[Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s] variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well-trained soldiers. But neither Hizballah nor Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards could react. Hizballah no longer has any large units capable of crossing the border to fight rebels in Syria, as they had done so many times before. As for the Revolutionary Guards, they were commandeering civilian airliners to fly troops into Damascus airport to support Assad. But then Israel made clear that it would not allow Iran’s troops so close to its border, and Iran no longer had credible counter-threats.

Now Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what? They have elaborate bases and showy headquarters, but their expensive ballistic missiles can only be used against defenseless Arabs, not Israel with its Arrow interceptors. As for Hizballah, clearly it cannot even defend itself, let alone Iran’s remaining allies in the region. Perhaps, in short, the dictatorship will finally be challenged in the streets of Iran’s cities, at scale and in earnest.