When the manuscript expert Paul Mirecki discovered half of a Torah scroll—ripped asunder mid-verse—in the University of Kansas collections, he began a quest for the other half. Some two years later, he has found it and reconstructed the story of the scroll, thought to have been written sometime in the 18th century. Jon Niccum writes:

In 1840, the scroll was intact and residing at a synagogue in the Algerian city of Medea—then an Ottoman province—when France invaded. Meanwhile, a local populace of Muslim extremists launched a pogrom against the Jewish community. The Arab religious and military leader Abd al-Kader intervened in hopes of preventing bloodshed, evacuating members of the Jewish community. But he couldn’t protect their property. As synagogues were looted, the item was taken, . . . likely by people who couldn’t read Hebrew and merely hoped to sell it. By ripping it, they had “two scrolls” and could double their profits.

Enter Henri d’Orléans, the duke of Aumale. The son of the last king of France and the governor-general during the French invasion of Algeria, the duke lived in Chateau Chantilly, [a sprawling estate north of Paris]. “I found a [passage] in his diary,” Mirecki said. . . . “He says in reference to the scroll, ‘I took it with my own hands from Medea’s synagogue in May 1840 when the town had been left to Muslims, and the Jews taken by Abd al-Kader.’” The duke brought it back home, where it remains in the vast collection of antiquities he eventually donated to the Institut de France.

Kansas University acquired its half of the scroll thanks to Alpha Owens. A student [at the school] in the early 1900s, she went on to earn her doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. A woman of wealth, Owens traveled throughout Europe and Latin America “collecting valuable realia material for use in modern language teaching,” according to a 1952 interview.

Examining the effects of Iran’s decision to launch nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, Benny Morris takes stock of the Jewish state’s strategic situation:

The massive Iranian attack has turned what began as a local war in and around the Gaza Strip and then expanded into a Hamas–Hizballah–Houthi–Israeli war [into] a regional war with wide and possibly calamitous international repercussions.

Before the Iranians launched their attack, Washington warned Tehran to desist (“don’t,” in President Biden’s phrase), and Israel itself had reportedly cautioned the Iranians secretly that such an attack would trigger a devastating Israeli counterstrike. But a much-humiliated Iran went ahead, nonetheless.

For Israel, the way forward seems to lie in an expansion of the war—in the north or south or both—until the country attains some sort of victory, or a diplomatic settlement is reached. A “victory” would mean forcing Hizballah to cease fire in exchange, say, for a cessation of the IDF bombing campaign and withdrawal to the international border, or forcing Iran, after suffering real pain from IDF attacks, to cease its attacks and rein in its proxies: Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

At the same time, writes Morris, a victory along such lines would still have its limits:

An IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon and a cessation of Israeli air-force bombing would result in Hizballah’s resurgence and its re-investment of southern Lebanon down to the border. Neither the Americans nor the French nor the UN nor the Lebanese army—many of whose troops are Shiites who support Hizballah—would fight them.