Around 200 CE, a group of rabbis produced a digest of legal opinions, together with some theological ones, known as the Mishnah. This was the first attempt (or the first attempt that survived) to put what these rabbis called the Oral Torah into writing. At some point, a parallel text, containing alternative opinions, was also put to parchment and given the name Tosefta—Aramaic for “addition.” Michael Satlow considers the oldest extant manuscript of the Tosefta, which once belonged to the Jewish community of the German city of Erfurt:

The Erfurt manuscript is the earliest and best witness to the Tosefta. Yet the Tosefta is itself a somewhat mysterious document. It reads much like the Mishnah, largely following its order. Some parts of it are identical to the Mishnah; others presuppose and comment on passages found in the Mishnah; and yet others seem to precede the Mishnah. While the Mishnah became the base text for two Talmuds (Palestinian and Babylonian), we do not know where, when, or why the Tosefta was redacted as a single document, nor how it was used.

That, though, is only preface to the story of our manuscript, which dates to the 12th century. The manuscript itself is hefty, heavy, and must have been expensive to produce. It is made of large parchment pages dotted with pinholes on the margin, to help the scribe keep a straight line. The scribe was also thrifty enough that when a page ripped, he stitched it back together rather than start a fresh one.

The Tosefta was one of fifteen extant Hebrew manuscripts used by the Erfurt Jewish community. Some of these manuscripts, such as an enormous Bible, are significant works, and there is a long, complex, and bloody history behind their survival. That story, with pogroms, property seizures, and ultimately the seizure of these manuscripts into Christian libraries, encapsulates the story of German Jews in the Middle Ages.

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].