Reviewing a recent biography of Issachar Zacharie, who treated President Lincoln’s foot ailments during the Civil War and won his trust, Harold Brackman writes:

A non-observant English Jew who sometimes claimed to be American-born, Zacharie worked for a time as a mohel in Gold Rush California. He won renown as a self-promoting medical healer and patent-medicine dispenser, who rose by force of personality and skill to become the country’s premier foot doctor—or chiropodist.

Zacharie’s great moment of fame came during the Civil War, when President Lincoln relied on him not only to treat his bunions, but to keep him abreast about Jewish and other political matters. In 1862, Lincoln sent him to New Orleans, recently occupied by Union troops, to consult with General Nathaniel P. Banks about how best to win over Southern Jews to the Union cause. Zacharie recruited a network of Jewish peddlers, whom he used to gather political and military intelligence. He urged Lincoln to rescind General Grant’s notorious . . . General Order No. 11, [expelling the Jews from Tennessee].

Returning to Washington in 1863, Zacharie—at the suggestion of General Banks—persuaded Lincoln to allow him to visit Richmond, where he met with the Jewish Confederate Judah P. Benjamin and broached . . . peace terms with other prominent Southern leaders. Confederate President Jefferson Davis was not interested.

But, as Brackman goes on to explain, Zacharie’s career ended in ignominy and he eventually returned to England.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.