By the 17th century, the Hebrew word pinkas, meaning notebook—a rabbinic-era borrowing from the Greek pinax, or writing tablet—had come to refer to the registry books kept by local Jewish communal institutions. These would be alternately reviled as signs of backwardness and praised as repositories of folk history. In fact, writes the historian Adam Teller, they were neither:

Last week, according to the New York Times, a powerful Iranian intelligence chief lost his job after a series of successful acts of sabotage, thought by many inside and outside of the Islamic Republic to have been carried out by the Mossad. Attributed to Israel are various suspicious explosions at sites connected to the Iranian nuclear program as well as the killing of seven members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in May and June—including two colonels. Eyal Zisser comments on the American reaction: