Happy is the eye that saw all this, but our souls were anguished by what our ear heard." This is the refrain of an ancient poem in the liturgy of Yom Kippur, a lament for its author's belatedness.

Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism

By Aviezer Ravitzky. Translated by Michael Swirsky and Jonathan Chipman

(University of Chicago Press, 303 pp., $17.95)