For a mere 650 euros (about $710), you can purchase Wer einmal war (“Who Once Was”), a who’s who of the golden age of Viennese Jewry. The Austrian city was home to Sigmund Freud, Theodor Herzl, the economist Ludwig von Mises, the composer Arnold Schoenberg, and the writers Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, along with countless other extraordinary figures. Giles MacDonogh writes:

Wer einmal war is a genealogy of the 500 leading Jewish families of Vienna between 1800 and 1938. . . . The author, Georg Gaugusch, is actually the owner of Jungmann und Neffe, Vienna’s most prominent tailor. It adjoins Sacher’s Hotel [famous home of the Sachertorte], between the two cultural poles of the Opera House and the Albertina [museum].

It surprises many to learn that Gaugusch is not Jewish; his family acquired the shop from Jews in the 1940s. The author is neither tailor nor historian: by training he’s a chemical engineer. In the cellars of the shop, however, he found an archive of its pre-war customers, many of whom were rich Jews. This he turned into a database, which became the starting point for the book. He befriended the archivist at the synagogue, Wolf-Erich Eckstein, who has been a pillar of support for him.

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].