Israel is a nation replete with contradictions; its economics, politics, and sociology often defy understanding. This Jewish state, located on the periphery of the Moslem world, has few natural resources of its own, while its neighbors to the south and east enjoy the benefits of oil wealth. It is geographically Middle Eastern, yet politically finds itself considered European. Its population is predominantly Asian and African, yet its political institutions and leadership, civilization, and national cultural figures are rooted in the West. Another contradiction, less obvious but no less puzzling, provides the subject of this article. In typical periods of inflation, real wages are eroded and the laboring class suffers from a reduction in its purchasing power. Yet in the inflationary economy characteristic of most of Israel's existence, the wage-earner has managed to escape the harm threatened by the ever-diminishing value of the currency. The ostensible explanation—indexed wage contracts— appear to be inadequate, for such agreements never provided full de jure coverage against inflationary erosion.

On Friday, July 18, 1924, Robert W. Imbrie, United States Consul in Tehran— and personal friend and special agent of Allen W. Dulles, Chief of the State Department's Near Eastern Affairs Division—was brutally killed. Imbrie was beaten to death by a mob led by members of the Muslim clergy and including many members of the Iranian Army. In the weeks preceding July 18, there had been several outbreaks of anti-Bahai violence. Imbrie and Melvin Seymour had gone that morning to investigate a miraculous watering place in central Tehran that figured in the anti-Bahai excitement. According to contemporary accounts, a Bahai had been struck blind after drinking from the source when he refused to make an offering in the name of the Shi'i saints; his sight miraculously had been restored after he had repented and made the donation.

Muhammad Kurd 'Alī referred to his teacher and close friend, Sheikh Tāhir al-Jazā'irī, as the Muhammad 'Abduh of Syria. Kurd 'Alī, however, was not alone in remarking upon the impact that al-Jazā'irī had in Syria during the lete nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Albert Hourani also mentioned him in comparison to 'Abduh:

Ideas such as those of 'Abduh were “in the air” in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. We find similar groups of reformers in all the more advanced Muslim countries, and perhaps it is too simple to explain them in terms of the influence of al-Afghānī and 'Abduh. It could be said… that al-'Urwa al-wuthqa could only have had its influence because there were already little groups of Muslims thinking on the lines which made it popular… In Syria similar men can be found in all the great centers of Muslim learning… Among those whom were roughly contemporary with 'Abduh and had some contact with him, was Tāhir al-Jazāir'ī,… a writer on literary and linguistic subjects, he had a wider importance through his work for the establishment of modern schools and the preservations of ancient books.

The protracted Turko-Armenian conflict, marked by intermittent massacres, was violently resolved during World War I. By governmental decree the bulk of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire was uprooted from its ancestral territories and was committed to a process of deportation that became a process of destruction. The provinces in the interior of Turkey with heavy concentrations of Armenians were thus completely denuded of their indigenous population.

Volumes have been produced regarding the instruments and dimensions of this destruction. The carnage was attested to by multitudes of Armenian survivors; by German, Swiss, and American missionaries; and by European and American consuls in the provinces and their ambassadors in Istanbul, the Ottoman capital. The testimony of Austrian and German officers of all ranks who fought in and directed that war alongside the Turks as political and military allies is even more striking.

The premier position of the Lāmiyyat al-'Arab among the poetry of al-shu'arā' al-Ta'alīk (the brigand-poets) of the Jāhiliyya is undeniable. Among scholars and philologists, both Arab and Orientalist, it has remained over the centuries the object of the most minute philological commentaries. Its Arab commentators number more than 20, among them the foremost names in classical Arabic literary scholarship: al-Mubarrad (d. 285/898), the doyen of the Basran school, whose commentary is said actually to have been taken from his Kufan archrival, Tha'lab (d. 291/904); the renowned poetic commentarist al-Tibrīzī (d. 502/1109); and the famed grammarian and Qur'anic commentator, al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1143). Its European popularity—a phenomenon that Blachére attributes to its appeal to the sensibilities of nineteenth-century Romanticism—dates to Sylvestre de Sacy's study and translation of 1826, followed by Rückert's German translation in his Hamāsa of 1846. In philological studies, of note are the more than 20 pages of his Beiträge that Nöldeke devotes to lexical matters and Jacob's extensive two-part Schanfará-Siudien.