At the beginning of the 20th century, Aramaic—once the Near East’s lingua franca and the native tongue of most of the world’s Jews—was widely spoken in Jewish communities in Iraq, Iran, and other areas. Since then various waves of persecution, of which the depredations of Islamic State are only the most recent, have greatly reduced the number of speakers of the language. Jacqueline Taylor describes one of several Jewish dialects of what linguists term Neo-Aramaic:

The community of Jewish Neo-Aramaic speakers from Urmia in the Western Azerbaijan region of Iran called themselves Nash Didan, which translates to “our people.” This community of roughly 400 families named their language Lishán Didán, which translates to “our language.”

Lishán Didán and other Jewish dialects are drastically different linguistically from the language of the Christian communities occupying the same land. . . . There has been a robust movement to preserve Christian dialects of Aramaic, but there is no similar mission to preserve the Jewish dialects. . . .

The current leadership of Iran has destroyed the ancient Nash Didan cemetery, leaving in its place an unfinished hospital and empty lot. The land of Urmia was inhabited for centuries by the same small Jewish community since the Babylonian captivity. [Already] outdated assessments show fewer than 5,000 speakers of Lishán Didán, and those speakers are very advanced in age.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].