As Moshe Koppel recently wrote in Mosaic, machine learning has enormous potential for analyzing classical Jewish texts in new ways. Gavriel Fiske reports on a recent example of such an analysis, which ended up finding evidence for what the great rabbi Solomon ben Isaac (Rashi) intuited a millennium ago:

Rabbinic commentators on the Talmud noted in the medieval era that a handful of sections of the great corpus stood out linguistically from the rest. Over generations of scholars, the existence of these so-called “special tractates” was considered to be a clue that could further elucidate how the Talmud was compiled and edited.

Now via modern data analysis, a team of contemporary researchers has shown that these “special tractates” do indeed display a distinct use of language. After feeding nearly the entire talmudic corpus into machine-learning algorithms to parse the Aramaic, they confirmed the theories of Rashi and other medieval scholars.

The clues here come from determining which of the many dialects of Aramaic are used most often. Of particular importance are the differences between the forms of the language spoken by the two main groups who composed the Talmud: Jews of the Galilee and Jews of Mesopotamia:

One of the “special tractates,” Tractate Tamid, which is concerned with the daily sacrifices in the Temple, was found to have a large number of lines flagged by the algorithm, but the team member Noam Eisenstein, an MA student at Tel Aviv University, observed that these lines all dealt with stories about Alexander the Great. If those lines were removed from the equation the tractate would just have normal Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, a possible indicator that those sections were compiled and added from a separate source.

For the past 36 hours, I’ve been reading and listening to analyses of the terms and implications of the recent hostage deal. More will appear in the coming days, and I’ll try to put the best of them in this newsletter. But today I want to share a comment made on Tuesday by the Palestinian analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. While he and I would probably disagree on numerous points about the current conflict, this analysis is spot on, and goes entirely against most arguments made by those who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and certainly those chanting for a cease-fire at all costs:

When a cease-fire in Gaza is announced, Hamas’s fascists will do everything they can to frame this as the ultimate victory; they will wear their military uniforms, emerge from their tunnels, stop hiding in schools and displacement centers, and very quickly reassert their control over the coastal enclave. They’ll even get a few Gazans to celebrate and dance for them.

This, I should note, is exactly what has happened. Alkhatib continues:

The reality is that the Islamist terrorism of Hamas, masquerading as “resistance,” has achieved nothing for the Palestinian people except for billions of dollars in wasted resources and tens of thousands of needless deaths, with Gaza in ruins after twenty years following the withdrawal of settlements in 2005. . . . Hamas’s propaganda machine, run by Qatari state media, Al Jazeera Arabic, will work overtime to help the terror group turn a catastrophic disaster into a victory akin to the battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad.

Hamas will also start punishing anyone who criticized or worked against it, and preparing for its next attack. Perhaps Palestinians would have been better off if, instead of granting them a temporary reprieve, the IDF kept fighting until Hamas was utterly defeated.