Anyone who has looked carefully at a High Holy Day prayerbook that follows the Ashkenazi tradition will have noticed the presence of liturgical poems (piyyutim) written by a man named Kalonymos or his son, Meshullam. This oddly named pair were part of a dynasty of medieval scholars who traced their roots to Italy. If the prayerbook is annotated, an even closer look might reveal several works by other sacred poets from Italy, like Amittai ben Shephatiah of Oria. Tamar Marvin explains how migration from Italy shaped the earliest Ashkenazi communities.

The many-branched Kalonymos family . . . turns up in early medieval southern Italy, from where they immigrate around the second half of the 9h century to the Rhineland. This move is said to have occurred under charters of settlement granted by a Carolingian ruler. Some sources state explicitly that the Carolingian king responsible was Charlemagne (ca. 747–814), but this is likely a later emendation and the date is considered improbably early. Rather, the consensus suggests that the king in question was Charles II “the Bald,” the grandson of Charlemagne and son of Louis I “the Pious,” who granted two extant charters of settlement to Jews, probably from Italy, to live in the Rhineland. There are also many individuals with the name Kalonymos in Provence, which are probably, though there is not definitive evidence, from the same family.

According to one of the family’s most famous members, Rabbi Eleazar of Worms, one of his ancestors received esoteric teachings from a mysterious figure named Abu Aharon, who had fled Babylonia for Lombardy.

On the same day the cease-fire went into effect along the Israel-Lebanon border, rebel forces launched an unexpected offensive, and within a few days captured much of Aleppo. This lightening advance originated in the northwestern part of the country, which has been relatively quiet over the past four years, since Bashar al-Assad effectively gave up on restoring control over the remaining rebel enclaves in the area. The fighting comes at an inopportune for the powers that Damascus has called on for help in the past: Russia is bogged down in Ukraine and Hizballah has been shattered.

But the situation is extremely complex. David Wurmser points to the dangers that lie ahead:

The desolation wrought on Hizballah by Israel, and the humiliation inflicted on Iran, has not only left the Iranian axis exposed to Israeli power and further withering. It has altered the strategic tectonics of the Middle East. The story is not just Iran anymore. The region is showing the first signs of tremendous geopolitical change. And the plates are beginning to move.

The removal of the religious-totalitarian tyranny of the Iranian regime remains the greatest strategic imperative in the region for the United States and its allies, foremost among whom stands Israel. . . . However, as Iran’s regime descends into the graveyard of history, it is important not to neglect the emergence of other, new threats. navigating the new reality taking shape.

The retreat of the Syrian Assad regime from Aleppo in the face of Turkish-backed, partly Islamist rebels made from remnants of Islamic State is an early skirmish in this new strategic reality. Aleppo is falling to the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS—a descendant of Nusra Front led by Abu Mohammed al-Julani, himself a graduate of al-Qaeda’s system and cobbled together of IS elements. Behind this force is the power of nearby Turkey.