Although we have alluded to the fact that Haredim “borrow” from others without attribution, I have come across a particularly egregious example. Here, is an article discussing the Romm Press and what became known as the Vilna Shas. Although the byline states that it was written “by Yated Ne’eman Staff” this is a wholesale reproduction of R. Shmuel Feigenshon’s article on this topic. Shmuel Feigenshon (Shafan HaSofer) was the editor of the Rom press for many years. He wrote a…
As some have mention in the comments to my previous post, the story of the Mahral and the Golem although many take it as true, it is not. Popularized by Rabbi Yudel Rosenberg, the work is a work of fiction, something even noted in a bibliography published of Rabbi Rosenberg’s works. Some of the people who discuss this are Ira Robinson, “Literary Forgery and Hasidic Judaism: the Case of Rabbi Yudel Rosenberg,” Judaism 40 (1991), pp. 61-78), Shnayer Z. Leiman,…
The newest version of the Talmud mss CD (the “Lieberman CD” or the “Sol and Evelyn Henkind Talmud Text Databank”), is now available. The newest version, using the Bar Ilan Responsa interface, includes transcriptions of all known mss of Talmud, including Cairo Genizah fragments at JTS, Cambridge and Oxford as well as scans of various mss (NOT those available via JNUL) of Talmud and Mishnah. It normally sells for $750 but if five (5) individuals get together they can each…
Gil has a nice post on the latest mythmaking regarding the Hazon Ish. Along those same lines, there is a farily well known story that goes something like this: An Orthodox person is sitting in the Jewish National Library and gets hungry. He takes out his lunch and then benches however, he does so in an audible tone. In his recitation he says the words שלא נכשל לעולם ועד. The librarian who is not Orthodox comes over to complain about…
There is a new sefer which offers a translation of Onkelos published by Gefen books. Onkelos, which is considered the authoritative translation of the Torah has, unfortunatly, suffered from the difficulty people have in reading it. Instead, most English speakers rely upon other translation, some which do not follow Onkelos. This has now been remidied by this new book “Onkelos on the Torah: Understanding the Bible Text” by Israel Drazin and Stanley Wagner. The book is very user friendly. It…
While I do not intend to focus solely on racy title pages, I do have a futher update to my previous posts I, II. It appears that the title page used in the Levush (Prauge, 1590) was actually a recycled page. It was first used in the Prague 1526 Haggada. Now aside from this page, which we have seen is objectionable to some today, there were other objectionable illustrations in this edition. Yerushalmi in his Haggadah and History, notes that…
