Little is known about Yedaya ha-Penini (ca. 1285–1340) except that he wrote several works of arcane religious poetry, following in the footsteps of his father Abraham of Béziers. Both were products of a Provençal Jewish culture that was heavily influenced by, but distinct from, that of nearby Spanish Jewry. Tamar Marvin reviews a recently published English translation of Penini’s poetic ethical discourse Sefer ha-Pardes, “The Book of the Orchard.”

Sefer ha-Pardes is surely a window into a lost world, with its late-medieval interest in the liberal arts, the didactic pleasure it takes in instructing its readers morally, and the linguistic play that clearly delights its seventeen-year-old author. Yedaya ha-Penini’s father . . . wrote, among other works, a poem called Elef Alefin (“A Thousand Alephs”), in which, as promised by the title, every word begins with the letter alef. Yedaya himself wrote a spin-off, Bakashat ha-Memim (“The Request of the Mems”), in which, yes, every word begins with a mem.

“The king fears two people: the doctor and the artist,” Yedaya opines. “Learning is like food, and stories arouse the appetite.” Sections of such pithy epigrams are interspersed with longer parables, all within the conceit of the request from Yedaya’s friend for “a memorial of universal principles on human moral attributes.”

Much of the pleasure of reading Sefer ha-Pardes, it must be said, resides in the Hebrew, rather uncomplicated by medieval belletristic standards, and therefore plausibly accessible to most readers of the language.

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].