Lord Rothschild’s Legacies

 Our daily media diet of murder and massacre in the Middle East carries on the history of more than four thousand years. Readers with a regularly well-thumbed Bible will need no guidance to the scores of horrible examples set out in the Old Testament; others, perhaps able to retrieve a Bible from somewhere beneath the dust of a back shelf, may take (simply as a reference at random) the last two chapters (20 and 21) of the Book of Judges.

There the ethnic cleansing of the day is illustrated by “smite the inhabitants of Jabesh-Gilead with the edge of the sword, with the women and the children”. And indeed this was promptly done, except that a hundred virgins were preserved for other purposes. In those backward Bronze Age times they lacked the refinements of guided missiles, rockets and high explosive. But they deserve full credit for the sweeping results obtained by simple old fire and sword, slingshot and club. Nevertheless, there was an uncanny foreshadowing of today’s “roadside…