Sometime in the 10th century, a gifted Jewish poet named Dunash ibn Labrat came to Cordoba from North Africa, after some years of study in Baghdad. He soon became embroiled in a fierce controversy over the structure of Hebrew roots with another prominent Hebrew poet and scholar, Menachem ben Saruk. Tamar Marvin tells their stories, and explains why this abstruse dispute was taken so seriously by their contemporaries:

Hebrew and Arabic are cognate languages. Arabic, however, was considered by the dominant Muslim culture to be the superior of all languages, uniquely pure and beautiful as it was used in the Quran. [Moreover], there was a fierce contest over the precise transmission of the biblical Hebrew corpus unfolding between Karaite and rabbinic Jews. [The former sect denied the authority of the Talmud and rabbinic tradition.] And if that weren’t enough, the actual meanings of biblical words had very real halakhic and cultural implications.

The rise of a literature of Hebrew grammar grew out of the achievements of the Masoretes [biblical scribes] in the 9th and 10th centuries and their elaborate system of encoding grammatical information into the Masoretic markings, including vowel points and cantillation marks. The first Hebrew dictionary and the first systemic linguistic treatise both came from the pen of [the Baghdad-based sage] Saadya Gaon. After him, medieval Hebrew linguistics flowered for a relatively brief time in Muslim Spain before being transmitted, though little transformed, into Hebrew-literate Christian Europe. The achievements of the Sephardi grammarians continue to reverberate in modern Hebrew.

Menachem ben Saruk holds the distinction of writing the first Hebrew-Hebrew dictionary: that is, one in which the definitions are given in Hebrew, as opposed to Arabic, like his colleagues’ offerings. . . . Dunash attacked Menachem for wrongful interpretations of words which, Dunash maintained, could lead people to mistakes in halakhic observance and even to heresy. The bitterness of the accusations has led to the question of whether Dunash was implicitly calling out Menachem as a Karaite.

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”