On the fast of the Ninth of Av, many Ashkenazi congregations recite an elegy “for the martyrs of York,” who were victims of a wave of anti-Semitic violence that swept through Britain following the coronation of Richard I. Recently uncovered evidence suggests that the beleaguered community swiftly recovered from the calamity. Rosa Doherty writes:

The tranche of information “dispels myths and challenges preconceptions” of what life was like for Jews in the years following the pogrom of 1190, when the city’s entire Jewish community was besieged inside Clifford’s Tower at York Castle by an anti-Semitic mob. The tower was burned down by locals after fabricated stories, which came to be known as the blood libel, spread that Jews were guilty of murdering Christian children and using their blood to perform religious rituals. An estimated 150 York Jews were murdered or took their own lives rather than renounce their faith.

Using documents from the Durham Cathedral Archives, academics have created digital reconstructions of the houses where the York’s most prominent Jewish citizens lived and have pinpointed the location of the city’s first synagogue. They have also traced how leading figures from the Jewish community cooperated with the senior clergy of York Minster in purchasing the large stone building which became the city’s Guildhall.

They include Leo Episcopus, his son-in-law Aaron of York, and Aaron’s nephew Josce le Jovene. Leo and Aaron were representatives of the Jewish community of England, and in the 1230s and 1240s the latter was thought to be the richest man in the country.

York recently welcomed its first resident rabbi since the expulsion of the Jews from England under King Edward I in 1290.

Examining the effects of Iran’s decision to launch nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, Benny Morris takes stock of the Jewish state’s strategic situation:

The massive Iranian attack has turned what began as a local war in and around the Gaza Strip and then expanded into a Hamas–Hizballah–Houthi–Israeli war [into] a regional war with wide and possibly calamitous international repercussions.

Before the Iranians launched their attack, Washington warned Tehran to desist (“don’t,” in President Biden’s phrase), and Israel itself had reportedly cautioned the Iranians secretly that such an attack would trigger a devastating Israeli counterstrike. But a much-humiliated Iran went ahead, nonetheless.

For Israel, the way forward seems to lie in an expansion of the war—in the north or south or both—until the country attains some sort of victory, or a diplomatic settlement is reached. A “victory” would mean forcing Hizballah to cease fire in exchange, say, for a cessation of the IDF bombing campaign and withdrawal to the international border, or forcing Iran, after suffering real pain from IDF attacks, to cease its attacks and rein in its proxies: Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

At the same time, writes Morris, a victory along such lines would still have its limits:

An IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon and a cessation of Israeli air-force bombing would result in Hizballah’s resurgence and its re-investment of southern Lebanon down to the border. Neither the Americans nor the French nor the UN nor the Lebanese army—many of whose troops are Shiites who support Hizballah—would fight them.