It is something of a truism that the printing press enabled the Reformation by allowing for the rapid dissemination of early Protestant tracts. For Jews, the printing press had similarly wide-ranging effects, but the most influential new ideas it made available were those of the Kabbalah. Reviewing Andrea Gondos’s new book on this subject, Avraham Oriah Kelman writes:

Gondos rejects the notion that Kabbalah enjoyed an undisturbed, linear transmission of knowledge from the elite to the masses through print. Gondos’s attempt to shift the scholarly focus from . . . content to literary format and genre allows us to consider new aspects of the spread of early modern Kabbalah, so we are called to consider not only the attractiveness of certain kabbalistic ideas, but also how they were packaged for a wider audience. While the new printing technology made kabbalistic writings physically accessible, this new readership needed more guidance to understand these complicated texts.

The invention of the printing press permitted the spread of previously esoteric texts to a much wider audience despite rabbinic protestations.

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”