The Star of David was not born as a symbol of state. Gershom Scholem spent decades tracing its history and found something unsettling: for centuries, the hexagram was an ornament, an amulet, a decorative figure without fixed theological weight. It appeared in synagogues and in mosques, in Jewish talismans and in Islamic manuscripts. It belonged to everyone because it belonged to no one in particular. Only in the nineteenth century, when European nationalism demanded that every people have its flag, its emblem, its consolidated visual identity, was the six-pointed star recruited to be the sign of the Jewish people. That identity was born modern. Born as choice, not as revelation.

I also chose. I did not flee anything, did not escape any persecution. I came because I wanted to, because there was something here that seemed worth an entire life. The salt of the Mediterranean in the morning, the sense of belonging to a project that had survived the impossible. That was the wager. And wagers, when lost, hurt in ways that only those who made them........

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