The ancient city of Dandan-Uiliq, abandoned centuries ago, is located in the Xinjiang region, where Communist China is currently carrying out one of its most brutal campaigns of persecution. Once the city was an important stop along the Silk Road. In 1901, an excavation of the ruins of a Buddhist monastery there revealed an ancient letter written in Hebrew script. At the time of its writing, Persian-speaking Jewish merchants were involved in trade across Eurasia, from southwestern Russia to the Chinese heartland. Ursula Sims-Williams explains how another recent discovery helped make sense of the document:

The document was provisionally dated to the end of the 8th century CE, when the site was abandoned, and this dating was confirmed by [modern scientific] analysis. . . . The letter proved to be written in Judeo-Persian, i.e. Persian written in Hebrew script. However since the beginning and end of each line was missing, there was only a limited amount of contextual information to be deduced. Mention of sheep trading and cloth indicates the document’s commercial nature and a reference to the author having written “more than twenty letters” attests perhaps to a thriving trade. There is also an intriguing request for a harp required for instructing a girl how to play.

In 2004, however, an almost intact leaf of a similar document was acquired by the National Library of China [that] appears to be the initial page of possibly the same letter. . . . The letter is from a Persian-speaking Jew of Khotan . . . on the subject of sheep trading. It lists bribes to officials [that] include a vase, scent, silk cloth, raw silk, sugar, and other items not yet fully understood. Perhaps the most important information was the news from [the nearby city of] Kashgar that “they killed and captured all the Tibetans.” The writer himself contributed “a sum worth 100 strings of coins, or 100,000 coins” for the war effort.

Taking both parts together the Dandan-Uiliq letter is probably the oldest surviving document of substance to be written in early New Persian, marking the first phase of the Persian language after the Islamic conquest.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.