In 1497, Portugal began the forced conversion of its Jewish population, which included large numbers of Jews who had fled there after their expulsion from Spain five years earlier. Thousands of Jews were massacred or deported and many more converted, leading to the establishment of the Portuguese Inquisition, which sought to stamp out real or imagined cases of the secret practice of Judaism among converts and their descendants. Under these circumstances, the survival of the Abravanel Bible in the library of the University of Coimbra—an institution founded in central Portugal in 1290—is quite remarkable. Cnaan Liphshiz writes:

[T]he handwritten Bible from the 15th century is perfectly preserved. The book is filled with drawings on parchment that are so vibrant they seem to have been recently created. The Abravanels—a distinguished, wealthy family with branches in Spain and Portugal that fled to Amsterdam and the Balkans during the Inquisition—commissioned twenty such Bibles. The volume in Coimbra is among the best preserved of the handful whose whereabouts are known today. . . .

The University of Coimbra has little information on how exactly it came to possess the Abravanel Hebrew Bible, possibly because it was hidden or scrubbed from the library’s indices to hide it from Inquisition agents. . . .

Thanks to the university’s undocumented policy of subterfuge against the Inquisition—its librarians essentially hid many books that censors would likely have wanted to destroy, reintroducing them to the indices only after the Inquisition was abolished in 1821—Coimbra was in possession of a collection of rare, pristine Jewish manuscripts found nowhere else.

On Tuesday, a Hizballah drone attack injured three people in northern Israel. The next day, another attack, targeting an IDF base, injured eighteen people, six of them seriously, in Arab al-Amshe, also in the north. This second attack involved the simultaneous use of drones carrying explosives and guided antitank missiles. In both cases, the defensive systems that performed so successfully last weekend failed to stop the drones and missiles. Ron Ben-Yishai has a straightforward explanation as to why: the Lebanon-backed terrorist group is getting better at evading Israel defenses. He explains the three basis systems used to pilot these unmanned aircraft, and their practical effects:

These systems allow drones to act similarly to fighter jets, using “dead zones”—areas not visible to radar or other optical detection—to approach targets. They fly low initially, then ascend just before crashing and detonating on the target. The terrain of southern Lebanon is particularly conducive to such attacks.

But this requires skills that the terror group has honed over months of fighting against Israel. The latest attacks involved a large drone capable of carrying over 50 kg (110 lbs.) of explosives. The terrorists have likely analyzed Israel’s alert and interception systems, recognizing that shooting down their drones requires early detection to allow sufficient time for launching interceptors.

The IDF tries to detect any incoming drones on its radar, as it had done prior to the war. Despite Hizballah’s learning curve, the IDF’s technological edge offers an advantage. However, the military must recognize that any measure it takes is quickly observed and analyzed, and even the most effective defenses can be incomplete. The terrain near the Lebanon-Israel border continues to pose a challenge, necessitating technological solutions and significant financial investment.