This month, Mosaic has offered a series of essays on Christian attitudes toward Judaism and the Jewish state. David Berger, the foremost authority on Jewish-Christian polemic in the Middle Ages, tackles Jews’ attitudes towards Christians in this interview with Elliot Resnick—among many other topics. He begins with the opinions of Rabbi Yeḥiel of Paris, whose disputation with a Catholic clergyman in 1240 was followed by the mass burning of Jewish religious texts:

Jews [involved in disputations] may have said things they didn’t mean in order to avoid persecution. . . . In Rabbi Yeḥiel’s disputation, he says the Talmud’s laws [prohibiting certain forms of intercourse with] non-Jews don’t apply to Christians. They only apply to the [pagan] nations of antiquity. [As in other cases], the question of Yeḥiel’s sincerity has been raised.

But Rabbi Menaḥem Meiri of Perpignan (1249-1315), who did not have a disputation with Christians, actually says the same thing even more vigorously and systematically. He says these laws don’t apply to umot g’durot b’darkhey ha-datot, which literally means “nations who are limited by the ways of religions”—that is, nations that have decent moral codes and believe in one God. So that means Christians and Muslims are exempted.

Between the explosion of thousands of Hizballah pagers on September 17 and now, Iran’s geopolitical clout has shrunk dramatically: Hizballah, Iran’s most important striking force, has retreated to lick its wounds; Iranian influence in Syria has collapsed; Iran’s attempts to attack Israel via Gaza have proved self-defeating; its missile and drone arsenal have proved impotent; and its territorial defenses have proved useless in the face of Israeli airpower. Edward Luttwak considers what might happen next:

The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be maneuvered into fighting a war against Iran. . . . Obama started his tenure by apologizing for America’s erstwhile support for the shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then-president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.

[Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s] variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well-trained soldiers. But neither Hizballah nor Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards could react. Hizballah no longer has any large units capable of crossing the border to fight rebels in Syria, as they had done so many times before. As for the Revolutionary Guards, they were commandeering civilian airliners to fly troops into Damascus airport to support Assad. But then Israel made clear that it would not allow Iran’s troops so close to its border, and Iran no longer had credible counter-threats.

Now Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what? They have elaborate bases and showy headquarters, but their expensive ballistic missiles can only be used against defenseless Arabs, not Israel with its Arrow interceptors. As for Hizballah, clearly it cannot even defend itself, let alone Iran’s remaining allies in the region. Perhaps, in short, the dictatorship will finally be challenged in the streets of Iran’s cities, at scale and in earnest.