In 1665, a young Jewish scholar named Shabbetai Tsvi declared himself the messiah in the synagogue in Smyrna (now Izmir, Turkey) to shouts of joy from those present. Soon messianic fervor swept Jewish communities across the world, in what would be the last global Jewish movement until the First Zionist Congress in 1897. He converted to Islam a year later after being arrested by the sultan, and died in 1676—but not before disseminating his unusual and heterodox mystical doctrines, which would continue to cause controversy in the Jewish world for the next 100 years. Some of his followers still live in Turkey today. Matt Goldish tells the story of Sabbatianism and its aftermath in a two-part conversation with Nachi Weinstein. Listen to the first part below, and to the second part here. (Audio, 105 minutes.)

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].