As the seminal works of the great talmudic scholar and theologian, Moses Maimonides, spread across North Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, they almost instantly attracted both admiration and criticism. Some of his opponents simply rejected his rationalist approach, deeply influenced by Aristotle and contemporary Islamic thought. Others—such as the French rabbi and polymath Levi Gersonides (1288–1344)—engaged in philosophic combat with him on his own rationalist ground. It is the latter group that are the focus of this conversation between Tamar Rudavsky and J.J. Kimche. (Audio, 62 minutes.)

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].