Like Herta Müller, Leo Perutz (1882–1957) was a novelist born into a German-speaking milieu in Eastern Europe, although he was not a Romanian Catholic but a Jew from Prague. His books, writes Michael Weingrad, are “intricate puzzle-novels that contain mystery plots and paranormal elements, yet often borrow aspects of the historical novel.” Weingrad takes a close look at one of them:

By Night Under the Stone Bridge is mainly set in the Prague of Emperor Rudolf II in the last three decades of the 16th century and the first two of the 17th. This is the Prague of the labyrinthine and paranoid imperial court, and of the mystics, scientists, and charlatans who flocked there, from Johannes Kepler and Giordano Bruno to John Dee and Edward Kelley. It is the kabbalistic Prague of Rabbi Judah Loew, [the Maharal], and his legendary golem, and the Jewish Prague of the ghetto and the cemetery that has been a focus of the anti-Semitic imagination.

Perutz began working on By Night Under the Stone Bridge in the 1920s, but he did not complete it until the early 1950s, by which time he was living in Tel Aviv. His Austrian publisher was hesitant to publish a book with explicit Jewish content, and when it appeared in 1957—the year Perutz died—it made little impression.

To make sense of this work, Weingrad compares it to another historical novel by another German-Jewish writer of the same era, Lion Feuchtwanger’s Jud Süß, in which, Weingrad writes, Kabbalah represents

Jewish vitality, the possibility of a Jewish existence that is rooted in tradition, and might be given modern form in conditions of political freedom. . . . In By Night Under the Stone Bridge, by contrast, Perutz allows for an active Kabbalah, but not as something redemptive or a national project. Instead, Jewish magic is a dream in which the lethal pressures portrayed by Feuchtwanger are held in temporary abeyance.

One of the greatest, and most baffling, of America’s errors since October 7 has been its indulgence of Qatar, a nominal ally that tends to act as anything but. Over the next week, I’m going to use this space to point to some of this regime’s bad behavior, and its deadly consequences. Today, I’ll focus on Al Jazeera, a state-sponsored media conglomerate that churns out anti-Israel and anti-American propaganda in a variety of languages. Douglas Murray calls attention to some of its employees in Gaza:

Take Muhammad Washah, whom Al Jazeera presented as a stellar part of the press corps merely reporting the truth. Unfortunately for them, their man is also a senior commander in Hamas. He used to be in Hamas’s anti-tank missile unit, but since 2022 he has been in charge of research and development for aerial weapons. Known to you and me as “rockets.”

It’s quite something to pull off. On the one hand, Washah can spend his days making rockets to fire at Israel. But in the evenings he can report on the terrible destruction in Gaza caused by the “Zionist entity.” . . . He might have kept getting away with it if IDF soldiers in Gaza had not managed to get a hold of his laptop.

And that’s why, Elliott Abrams explains, supporters of freedom of the press should have no qualms about Washington pressing Doha about the network—or about Israel’s decision to prevent it from operating within its borders:

While organized as a private company, Al Jazeera is the voice of Qatar’s regime. It was founded and financed by the then-emir of Qatar. Whenever I am told that this is not true, and that Al Jazeera is really an independent news source, I ask a simple question: show me one time since its founding nearly 30 years ago that it has voiced one criticism of the Qatari government. I’m still waiting.

And it’s not just Al Jazeera: Qatar owns other news media that are equally awful. . . .

These news sources are not free; they need to stay close to the Qatari official line and never contradict it in significant ways. . . . And that is what makes their pernicious role so consequential: Qatar could turn them off, or turn them into actual independent news sources, if it wished. Instead it wishes to promote and laud violence.