God said “It is not good that man be alone: I will make him a helper, a counterpart to him. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and clings to his wife, so that they become one flesh. (Genesis 2:18, 24) As a rose among the thorns, so is my beloved among the young women. As an apple tree among the forest trees, so is my beloved among the young men (Song of Songs 2:2,3). A man takes…
The term “רש״י ישן” in printed editions often appears after a comment recorded in parentheses. An example of this is Rashi in Breishit 12:2. Here is how it looks in the first edition of the Artscroll Stone Chumash printed in November 1993: Rashi’s comments are recorded as follows Comment #1 ואעשך לגוי גדול. לְפִי שֶׁהַדֶּרֶךְ גּוֹרֶמֶת לִשְׁלֹשָׁה דְבָרִים, מְמַעֶטֶת פְּרִיָּה וּרְבִיָּה וּמְמַעֶטֶת אֶת הַמָּמוֹן וּמְמַעֶטֶת אֶת הַשֵּׁם, לְכָךְ הֻזְקַק לִשְׁלֹשָׁה בְּרָכוֹת הַלָּלוּ, שֶׁהִבְטִיחוֹ עַל הַבָּנִים וְעַל הַמָּמוֹן וְעַל הַשֵּׁם: Comment…
In September of 2024, I accidentally opened the portal to a priestly mystery. While searching for references to the first Jewish students to attend the University of Gottingen Medical School, I came across an antisemitic work published in 1753 about the general dishonesty of Jews and Jewish oaths. Therein were a few disparaging references to Jewish physicians, one of whom was named Lehmann Isaac Kohen. A parenthetical footnote,3 likely precipitated by the student’s last name, caught my attention. The author…
David Livni was born in Vilna in 1870. He was educated in traditional Orthodox schools and joined the proto-Zionist Hovevi Tzion movement. In 1906, he and his wife and five children moved to Israel. The children were among the first students of Herzliya Gymnasium, and David was one of the founders of Tel Aviv and its Great Synagogue. He served on its board until he fell out with its leadership regarding financial matters. Construction of the synagogue began in 1920….
Jay R. Berkovitz, Protocols of Justice: The Pinkas of Metz Rabbinic Court 1771-1789, (2 vol., 222 pp. +1084 pp.), Brill 2014 Jay R. Berkovitz, Law’s Dominion, Jewish Community, Religion and Family in Early Modern Metz,(404 pp.) Brill 2022 A decade ago, Professor Jay Berkovitz, a Professor and Chair of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, published the Pinkas (record book or register) of the Rabbinic Court in Metz. Jews began living in Metz, a town…
1. We have recently seen behavior by so-called religious Jews that is vile. I refer to the actions of Neturei Karta. Of course, we have all seen their antics in the past, but I think most of us looked at them as clowns and sick people that maybe we should feel sorry for. This is no longer the case. Now they are marching in support of the murderers of Jews, aligning themselves with the enemy, and attempting to destroy the…
In this post I would like to highlight and briefly describe a select list of seforim, some of which are brand new and others are a few years old. Several seforim are mentioned here due to relation to this time of year [i.e. Elul and Tishrei related] and for various reasons did not receive proper notice. The first title I would like to mention is: שערי תפילה ומועד, אסופת מאמרים, תשפ”ד, 662 עמודים I am very happy to announce the…
Rabbi Jeffrey Saks, Director of ATID and its WebYeshiva.org program, is Director of Research at Agnon House in Jerusalem and editor of the journal Tradition. Thanks to Prof. Mordecai Schwartz and Andrew Katz of the JTS Library for their assistance, and to Curt Leviant, whose questions prodded this research. “All day I see the parchment burning, but its letters are soaring to heaven—and even at night my heart will not rest,” wrote S.Y. Agnon a century ago after the burning…
Marc Herman is an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and a core member of the Centre for Jewish Studies at York University. His research focuses on Jewish and Islamic intellectual history in the medieval Mediterranean. He is the coeditor of Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism: Studies in Law, Philosophy, Pietism, and Kabbalah (Brill, 2021) and his monograph, titled After Revelation: The Rabbinic Past in the Islamic World, is under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press….
Shmuel Lubin is a doctoral candidate in biology and creator of “The Rishonim” podcast. There is an old tradition commonly referenced in the yeshiva community that Masekhet Ketubot is the “Shas Kattan” of Talmud Bavli, that is, it contains ideas that connect to just about every other area of Shas (short for “Shisha Sidrei,” all six orders of the Mishnah). The source and importance of this idea is the subject of a nice article by R. Tovia Preschel, found here….
Yaakov Taubes is the rabbi at Mount Sinai Jewish Center in Washington Heights, New York. He also serves as an assistant director at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary at Yeshiva University, and is a PhD candidate in Medieval Jewish History at the Bernard Revel Graduate School for Jewish Studies. He can be reached at rabbi@mtsinaishul.com. This article follows from the excellent piece by Eli Genauer about the printing and reorganization of the Sefer ha-Chinukh. To review, Genauer described how…
Aton.holzer@gmail.com ORCID ID: 0000-0001-9852-3958 28 Binyamin, Beit Shemesh, Israel 9952200 The Mishnah in Ta’anit (4:6) puts forth a series of lists of five calamities that befell the Jews on each of two major fast days, the seventeenth of Tammuz and the ninth of Av, beginning in the days of Moses in the Wilderness and culminating after Bar Kochba: חמשה דברים ארעו את אבותינו בשבעה-עשר בתמוז (וב) וחמשה בתשעה באב. בשבעה-עשר בתמוז נשתברו הלוחות ובטל התמיד והובקעה העיר ושרף אפיסטמוס את…
Rachel Manekin is Professor Emerita of Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland. Her area of specialization is the social, political, and cultural history of Galician Jewry. She is the author of The Jews of Galicia and the Austrian Constitution: The Beginning of Modern Jewish Politics (Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2015, Hebrew), and most recently, The Rebellion of the Daughters: Jewish Women Runaways in Habsburg Galicia (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2024; Hebrew). Her previous essay at The Seforim Blog…
Although a Sephardi Machzor was published in 1766 in colonial New York by Isaac Pinto, the first Jewish book printed in the newly formed United States that I am aware of was a calendar published by Moses Lopez of Newport, in 1806. Lopez born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1740 with the given name Duarte to a “New Christian” family, arrived with that family in Newport in 1767 on a ship sent by his uncle Aaron where he was circumcised together…
1. Following up on what I wrote here and here about the term צעירים (Franciscans) and other expressions used with reference to Catholic religious orders, Brian Schwartz called my attention to a couple of relevant sources. In Milhemet Hovah (Constantinople, 1710), p. 14a, R. David Kimhi mentions a theological argument he had with one of the חכמי הצעירים. In Ginzei Nistarot (1868), vol. 2, p. 10, R. Jacob of Venice in his anti-Christian polemic mentions the צעירים and the דורשים…