Daniel Pinner’s brilliant letter to Queen Elizabeth.
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I look over Shechem - the city where, three and a half millennia ago, when your ancestors in England were still living in trees and painting their faces with woad, my great-great-great (however many times over) grandfather Jacob saw his sons, Shimon (Simeon) and Levi, declare war against the entire city of Shechem because their prince dared to rape their sister Dinah. I needn’t go into the gory details here, because it’s clearly written in my people’s national history book - Genesis, Chapter 34. (In 1611, your ancestor, King James I, commissioned an English translation of my people’s holy book, so Your Majesty should have no difficulty reading the text.)

Ever since that day, 3,500 years ago, we have known to rely on no one’s protection but our own and God’s. It is an interesting concept of time and of history: your roots in England go back to 1066 - almost a thousand years; a history of which to be justifiably proud. Yet when your history was just beginning, our roots were already buried more than 2,500 years deep in Shechem. In fact, the village in which I live, Kfar Tapuach, gets its first mention in the Bible; again, look it up in Joshua 12:17, 16:8, 17:7, and plenty of other places. You see, my people’s historical and geographical record pinpointed the location of Kfar Tapuach, and delineated the borders of our Holy Land, and defined the borders of the territory of each of the twelve Tribes of Israel well over 2,000 years before the Domesday Book was ever compiled.