Careful: armed Jews

From the Afterword of Gentlemen of the Road, this:

The original working— and in my heart the true— title of this short novel was Jews with Swords. When I was writing it, and happened to tell people the name of my work-in-progress, it made them want to laugh. I guess it seemed clear that I meant the title as a joke. It has been a long time, after all, since Jews anywhere in the world routinely wore or wielded swords; so long that, when paired with 'sword', the word 'Jews' (unlike, say, 'English- men' or 'Arabs') clangs with anachronism, with humorous incongruity, like Samurai Tailor or Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Jewish soldiers fought in the blade-era battles of Austerlitz and Gettysburg; notoriously, Jewish boys were stolen from their families and conscripted into the czarist armies of nineteenth-century Russia. Any of these fighting men, or any of the Jews who served in the armed forces (particularly the cavalry units) of their homelands prior to the end of World War One might have qualified, I suppose, as Jews with swords.
But, hearing the title, nobody seemed to flash on the image of doomed Jewish troopers at Inkerman, Antietam, or the Somme, or of dueling Arabized courtiers at Muslim Granada, or even, say, on the memory of some ancient warrior Jew, like Bar Kochba or Judah Maccabee, famed for his prowess at arms. They pictured, rather, Woody Allen backing toward the nearest exit behind a barrage of wisecracks and a wavering rapier.

Rico says that Jews With Swords is the State of Israel...