In the latter part of the 11th century, Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, known by the acronym Rashi, wrote a commentary on the Hebrew Bible that would forever change how Jews approached the sacred text: explaining its meaning line-by-line and focusing on what he called the p’shat, or plain meaning, while drawing on the vast body of exegetical (and often nonliteral) works that preceded him. Likewise, the 12th century saw a similar shift in Christian Bible study, centered in northern France, where Rashi also made his home. Robert Harris explores the reasons for this parallel:

This surge in commentary among Christian and Jewish exegetes . . . suggests that we should be looking for intellectual and cultural developments in 11th-century Christian Europe to understand how this change in approach to Bible came about. But to get the full picture, we need to look even earlier, to the 8th-century period under Charlemagne, and to the subsequent cultural revival that took place in the Carolingian period (that is, in the 8th and 9th centuries).

In an effort to establish and legitimize their new dynasty, Charlemagne, himself a faithful Christian, endeavored to co-opt the Roman Church and its institutions. Part of his strategy was creating a learned and literary caste that could serve as the clerks, administrators, diplomats, and magistrates who held his far-flung empire together. To accomplish this, he instituted schools that would teach far greater numbers of people how to read. For scribal training, Charlemagne used ancient Greco-Roman learning in the service of the Church.

The resulting “Carolingian renaissance,” Harris explains, would give rise to new institutions of higher learning that would eventually lead to the intellectual ferment of the 12th century:

While the Carolingian revolution may explain how Christian interpretation developed in this direction, how did intellectual developments in the Christian world influence rabbinic exegetes? While some rabbis could converse about Latin scriptures when in the presence of learned Christians, no rabbi could likely have sat down and read a Latin book any more than a 12th-century churchman could have read a Hebrew book without help from a Jewish scholar.

[However], Jews and Christians conducted a lively discourse about biblical interpretation during this period, in a wide variety of social circumstances, certainly in the 12th century, but probably in the 11th as well, and the Christian turn to contextual reading was likely influential in the thinking of their Jewish colleagues.

Of course, influence went in both directions. The great 12th-century Christian Bible commentator Andrew of St. Victor, whose mentor Hugh of St. Victor was the leading figure in the Christian turn to literal interpretation, studied Hebrew so he could draw on the commentaries of Rashi and others. He was one of the very first Christian scholars since antiquity to do so.

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.