The land of Israel is full of ancient mikvehs, Jewish ritual baths, testifying to Jews’ long history in the area. But far fewer ancient mikvehs have been discovered outside the Middle East. Researchers conducting excavations in Italy seem to have stumbled upon one, according to Eli Wizevich:

Less than fifteen miles from Rome, Ostia Antica was once a bustling cosmopolitan seaport at the mouth of the Tiber River, where many Mediterranean cultures mingled. For all its importance in Roman history, however, some parts of Ostia Antica have been long overlooked by modern archaeology.

So when Luigi Maria Caliò, an archaeologist at the University of Catania, brought his students to work on an excavation in Ostia Antica last summer, his expectations were tempered. Instead, they unearthed what appears to be the oldest mikveh in Europe, likely dating back to the late 5th or early 5th century CE. As Riccardo Di Segni, Rome’s chief rabbi, tells the New York Times, “such an antique mikveh has never been found” outside of the Middle East.

Caliò’s team found the roughly 1,600-year-old mikveh in a “large and rich domus”—a Latin word for a private family residence—in a central area of Ostia Antica. The underground rectangular pool was fed by groundwater and covered in black and white tiles. Linked to a circular well, it was deep enough for an average sized adult man to fully submerge himself.

Some archaeologists, however, caution against calling the bathing site a mikveh. . . . But for other scholars, the verdict was all but confirmed by the discovery of an oil lamp decorated with images of a menorah and lulav (a palm frond used during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot) at the bottom of the pool.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.