For traditional Jews around the world, the central code of Jewish law is the 16th-century Shulḥan Arukh, composed by the great Spanish-born sage Joseph Karo. This work is a consolidation of Karo’s commentary on an earlier work, the Arba’ah Turim (“Four Rows”) of Jacob ben Asher (ca. 1269-1343), a German sage who immigrated to Christian Spain with his father—himself a great Talmudist—and embodied a synthesis of Ashkenazi and Sephardi schools of learning. Part of this work was recently acquired, in the rarest of forms, by the National Library of Israel. The Jerusalem Post reports:

The National Library of Israel in Jerusalem announced on Tuesday that it has obtained 90 singular pages from the earliest period of Hebrew printing.

The pages come from the only known copy of a late-15th-century edition of Rabbi Jacob ben Asher’s Arba’ah Turim, one of history’s most important works of Jewish law. No complete copies of it have survived, and the pages acquired . . . are not found in any other collection in the world, public or private. Prior to the acquisition, the library already held 59 pages from the book.

Works published prior to 1500 are known as “incunabula” (from the Latin for swaddling clothes, cradle; the earliest stage of something). During this period, less than 200 total Hebrew titles were printed, of which around 150 have survived until today. The National Library of Israel has copies of more than 80 of them.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”