As early as the 3rd century CE, Christian writers argued that Jews lived in exile, with their Temple destroyed and their sovereignty lost, because God had chosen to punish them for their rejection of Jesus. Jewish thinkers had a simple rebuttal: God was indeed punishing His people with exile—as the biblical prophets had said He would—but was doing so because they had failed to observe His Law. In the Middle Ages, as Jewish-Christian relations became more intimate, Jews developed what Michael Weiner argues is a different sort of answer: imagining that in some faraway land, Jews maintained their political independence:

The medieval legends told about such Jews, often understood to be the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, [suggest] that not all Jews were content to accept traditional explanations for exile and loss of autonomy, and desired the comfort of knowing that Jews still ruled somewhere, somehow.

[When] the 14th-century Spanish Rabbi Shlomo ha-Levi converted to Christianity, his [former] student Yehoshua ha-Lorki wrote a letter to him attempting to bring him back into the fold by rebutting arguments for Christianity. He included a telling passage insisting that Jewish subjugation under Christendom didn’t prove anything because, after all, “the members of the ten tribes continue to conduct an independent life, . . . not dominated by any foreign power.”

Other examples abound. The writings of Eldad ha-Dani, a 9th-century Jewish merchant who traveled throughout Europe claiming to be the member of a Jewish community in East Africa that descended from the Ten Lost Tribes, were widely read, discussed, and accepted by many. A medieval Jewish folktale about the origins of Akdamut, [a liturgical poem for the festival of Shavuot], relates that during a period of dangerous Christian anti-Semitism, Rabbi Meir of Worms traveled across the Sambatyon River, [the legendary stream that rests on the Sabbath], to meet with an otherworldly Jewish community beyond the river, some of whose members he sent back to Worms to defeat an anti-Semitic priest through mystical incantations and invocations of God’s name.

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].