In the 19th century, a group of German Jewish university students decided to apply the new methods of academic history and critical scholarship to the past of their own people, creating what they dubbed Wissenschaft des Judentums—Jewish studies. Although these groundbreaking scholars had tremendous regard for the accomplishments of medieval Spanish Jewry, they tended to downplay the history of Sephardim in the modern era. A Bosnian Jew named Moshe David Gaon (1889–1958) dedicated much of his life to remedying that situation, as Yoel Finkelman writes:

Central . . . to Gaon’s project was gathering and creating new sources of knowledge, and this meant reaching out to sources of information far and wide. His extensive archive reflects the work he did in creating a bibliography, particularly of important Ladino newspapers. It documents his groundbreaking work on the influential Ladino biblical commentary, Me’am Loez. Gaon published works of Sephardi Hebrew poetry, and he gathered biographies of influential Sephardi rabbis. His most important work is Yehudei ha-Mizraḥ b’Erets Yisrael (1928), a compendium of information on Sephardi Jewry in the Land of Israel. It remains an important reference work today, and it has been reprinted several times.

Gaon also kept his finger on the pulse of current events, asking colleagues for documentation of their own experiences in real time. When, in 1934, a man in the city of Basra in Iraq claimed to be the messiah, Gaon immediately brought his letter-writing skills to bear on documenting the event. Writing in the name of the Sephardi Community Council, Gaon insisted on getting as much information as possible about the man, his motivations, and the community’s response to his messianic pretentions.

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.