There is an old line that Jews everywhere in the world know: wherever they are in the world they should keep a bag packed in case they had to leave. The expulsions of Jews from England in the thirteenth century and from Spain in the fifteenth century left a long memory. The forced flight of Jews from across the rest of the Middle East in and after 1948 created another one. For decades the conversation around Friday-night dinner tables across the diaspora regularly turned to this question, often to the tedium of the younger generation, who thought that their parents were simply paranoid. The
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