I’ll end on a less dire note with this introduction to the life and work of Abraham Ibn Daud (1110–1180), a Cordovan rabbi who spent most of his adult life in Toledo, and could be considered the Diaspora’s first Jewish historian. Tamar Marvin explains his most famous work, Sefer ha-Kabbalah, or the Book of the Tradition:

Sefer ha-Kabbalah is, to our modern eyes, largely unsourced and at times clearly fabricated, for example, lifting tropes from well-known aggadot [rabbinic tales] of the Babylonian Talmud. It is also a masterpiece of premodern historiography that serves as one of our best and only sources for many events, especially those occurring in medieval Spain. In its partial truths, as we would identify them today, it also records kernels we know to reflect historical realities, as well as informing us about the communal-historical beliefs of Jewish elites in 12th-century Spain.

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].