Opinion: When something happens for the first time in 1,871 years, it is worth noting. In AD 70, and again in 135, the Roman Empire brutally put down Jewish revolts in Judea, destroying Jerusalem, killing hundreds of thousands of Jews and sending hundreds of thousands more into slavery and exile.
For nearly two millenniums, the Jews wandered the world, and now, in 2006, for the first time since then, there are once again more Jews living in Israel than in any other place on earth. Israel's Jewish population has just passed 5.6 million. America's Jewish population was about 5.5 million in 1990, dropped to about 5.2 million 10 years later and is in a precipitous decline that will cut that number in half by mid-century.
When six million European Jews were killed in the Holocaust, only two main centres of Jewish life remained: America and Israel. That binary star system remains today, but a tipping point has just been reached. With every year, as the Jewish population continues to rise in Israel, and decline in America, Israel becomes the centre of the Jewish world.
An epic restoration, and one of the most improbable. To take just one of the remarkable achievements of the return: Hebrew is the only "dead" language in recorded history to have been brought back to daily use as the living language of a nation. But there is a price and a danger to this transformation - it radically alters the prospects for Jewish survival.
For 2,000 years Jews found protection in dispersion - protection not for individual communities which were routinely persecuted and massacred, but protection for the Jewish people as a whole. Decimated here, they could survive there. They could be persecuted in Spain but find refuge in Constantinople.
Hitler put an end to that illusion. He demonstrated that modern anti-Semitism married to modern technology - railroads, disciplined bureaucracies, gas chambers that kill with industrial efficiency - could take a scattered people and "concentrate" them for complete annihilation.
The establishment of Israel was a Jewish declaration to a world that had allowed the Holocaust to happen - after Hitler had made his intentions perfectly clear - that the Jews would henceforth resort to self-protection and self-reliance.
However, in a cruel historical irony, doing so required concentration - putting all the eggs back in one basket, a tiny territory hard by the Mediterranean, eight miles wide at its waist. A tempting target for those who would finish Hitler's work.
His successors now reside in Tehran. The world has paid ample attention to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's declaration that Israel must be destroyed. Less attention has been paid to Iranian leaders' pronouncements on exactly how Israel would be destroyed "by a single storm", as Ahmadinejad has promised.
Former president Hashemi Rafsanjani has explained that "the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam".
The logic is impeccable, the intention clear: a nuclear attack would destroy tiny Israel, while any retaliation launched by a dying Israel would have no major effect on an Islamic civilisation of a billion people stretching from Mauritania to Indonesia.
As it races to acquire nuclear weapons, Iran makes clear that if there is any trouble, the Jews will be the first to suffer.
When its mullahs acquire their coveted nukes in the next few years, the number of Jews in Israel will just be reaching six million. Never again?
© 2006, the Washington Post writers group