Reflecting on the endurance of the Jewish people, Daniel B. Schwartz turns to a 16th-century work of Jewish history called Shevet Yehudah (“The Scepter of Judah”), written by Solomon ibn Verga, a Portuguese converso who returned to Judaism and settled in the Ottoman empire. One section recounts the story of a “Job-like” Jewish exile who finds himself shipwrecked and alone in a remote wilderness, his family dead. The man offers a defiant prayer:

Lord of the universe! Although you are doing much to make me abandon my religion, know for certain that, despite the heavenly hosts, a Jew I am, and a Jew will I remain, and nothing you have brought or will yet bring upon me will help you!

Schwartz concludes:

The steadfastness of this unnamed Spanish Jewish exile is rooted in a blunt facticity. “A Jew I am, and a Jew I will remain.” It is something visceral, instinctive; something that stems not from reason, not even from faith, but from the kishkes. It is as though, for this man, to be a Jew is to survive, and there is no survival if not as a Jew. Perhaps it is this core intuition, a preconceptual understanding that lies beyond the reach of explanation or justification, preceding any talk of flexibility and adaptability, and that ultimately cannot be taught, built, or cultivated — “a Jew I am, and a Jew I will remain” — that brings us nearest to the nucleus of resilience in Jewish history. And those of us who carry this embodied spirit are its atoms.

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].