Born Shneur Zalman Rubashov in 1889, Zalman Shazar would serve in Israel’s first cabinet and later as the country’s president from 1963 until 1973. Shazar, however, was not a politician by calling but a historian, who studied under Simon Dubnov—then the dean of Russian Jewish historians—and later trained at German universities. His research on the disastrous career of the 17th-century false messiah Shabbetai Tsvi would inspire Gershom Scholem’s definitive studies. Stuart Schoffman revisits Shazar’s peculiar fascination with this historical figure:

Just as historians have begun to re-evaluate Ḥasidism, Rubashov declared [in a 1913 essay], they should appreciate the vital “sap” of Sabbateanism, its power to inspire the Jewish nation. . . . In 1924, Zalman Rubashov made aliyah. The next year, . . . he wrote an editorial entitled “Yom Shabbetai Tsvi,” [in which he argued that] if we Jews were fully rooted in our history, we would honor Shabbetai Tsvi on this, his 300th birthday. . . . Shabbetai built a “popular movement such as the diaspora had never known.” He “overcame the diaspora, vanquished the medieval nature of Judaism, and forced open the gates of a new Hebrew history.” He “struck new fire from the eternal rocks of religion, to redeem the people and the individual.”

In other words: the Great Pretender was a tragic Promethean hero who ignited an enduring revolution. Writing in Hebrew in secular Tel Aviv, Shazar boldly spun a messianic fiasco into a Zionist manifesto. . . .

Scholem delivered a tribute [to Shazar after his death in 1974]: “In a certain sense, it was Shazar’s personal tragedy that he was unable to fulfill his destiny as a historian. . . . The scholar and statesman within him strove to dwell together but could not find balance and compromise.”

I . . . beg to differ. Leafing through the Sabbatean studies of Israel’s third president, I hark back to his mentor Simon Dubnov, who wrote in 1893: “We recount the events of the past to the people, not merely to a handful of archaeologists and numismaticians. We work for national self-knowledge, not for our own intellectual diversion.” Some historians do it best on the page, others on the stage of Jewish history.

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].