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What is Bothering the Aruch Hashulchan? Women Wearing Tefillin

What is Bothering the Aruch Hashulchan? Women Wearing Tefillin

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mbroyde@emory.edu Please note that this piece isn’t meant to be construed one way or another as the view of the Seforim Blog. Introduction In our previous article, we focused on the view of the Mishnah Berurah concerning women wearing tefillin. In this article, we focus on the Aruch Hashulchan, whose approach is also complex, reflecting the complexity of the area. The Aruch Hashulchan (OC 38:6) states: נשים ועבדים פטורים מתפילין מפני שהיא מצות עשה שהזמן גרמא דשבת ויו”ט פטור מתפילין…

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A Response to Yaakov Rosenes

A Response to Yaakov Rosenes

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Menachem Lazar is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, studying applied mathematics and materials science. He has previously served as editor of Beit Yitzchak, an annual Talmud publication of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. In a recent essay at the Seforim blog, Yaakov Rosenes provides a fascinating window into some unfortunate trends in the world of Jewish publishing. In particular, Rosenes highlights how technology has impacted not only how seforim are printed today, but also what seforim…

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Demythologising the Rabbinic Aggadah: Menahem Meiri

Demythologising the Rabbinic Aggadah: Menahem Meiri

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Many of the mediaeval Jewish teachers, partly in defence of the Talmud against attack by the Karaites, partly because of their own rationalistic stance, engaged in what Marc Saperstein in a fine study has called ‘decoding the Rabbis’. That is to say, passages, especially in the Talmudic Aggadah, which seemed to them offensive to reason and general religious sensibilities, these teachers interpreted in the light of their own philosophical views, treating the Talmudic Aggadah as if it were a code…

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Publish and Perish or Digital death

Publish and Perish or Digital death

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About the author: Yaakov Rosenes made Aliya from Canada after graduating from Trent Univ. and U of I Chicago Circle. In the 70’s he held various research and administrative positions at Yad HaRav Herzog, Feldheim publishers, and Machon Yerushalayim. In the 1980’s he founded the Judaica Archival Project, a Preservation and Access program for Rabbinics at JNUL. Since the 1990’s the Project has offered bibliographic and book-finding services at www.virtualgeula.com. Introduction: Since the advent of the Internet, the nature of…

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Book week 2014

Book week 2014

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Eretz Yisrael. As I have written in previous years every year in Israel, around Shavous time, there is a period of about ten days called Shavuah Hasefer – Book Week (see here, here, here here, here here and here). One should take advantage of this sale as a law was passed recently against sales on newly published books, for the first 18 months after the book was published, except for book week. Many of the companies offer sales for the…

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Assorted Comments

Assorted Comments

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1. In this post I mentioned the strange comment of R. Shabbetai Bass in his Siftei Hakhamim, Exodus 33:13, Moses thought that God was joking with him. A few readers emailed me that in the new Mikraot Gedolot Ha-Maor this passage has been deleted, i.e., censored. Here is how the passage looks in the first edition of Siftei Hakhamim, published in R. Bass’ lifetime.. Here is the passage as it appears in the censored Mikraot Gedolot Ha-Maor. Fortunately, the new…

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The Pew Report and the Orthodox Community (and Other Assorted Comments), part 1

The Pew Report and the Orthodox Community (and Other Assorted Comments), part 1

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1. Here is a short piece I wrote a right after the appearance of the Pew Report. (The endnote is not part of the original article.) There has been a great deal of discussion in the wake of the recent release of the Pew Research Center’s “Portrait of Jewish Americans.” Some have focused on the report’s evidence of increasing intermarriage and lack of any Jewish connection of many in the younger generation. Others have zeroed in on some of the…

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Tracing the history of eating milchigs on Shavuos

Tracing the history of eating milchigs on Shavuos

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In this post I would like to deal with tracing the early sources for the minhag of eating milchigs on Shavuos. A version of this article was printed last year in the Ami Magazine (# 119). This post contains a few corrections and additions to that version. A much more expanded version of this article will appear in Hebrew shortly (IY”H). Eating the vast array of customary dairy delicacies on Shavuos including, of course, cheesecake, is a minhag that very…

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A Mild Case of Plagiarism: R. Abraham Kalmankes’ Ma’ayan Ha-Hokhmah

A Mild Case of Plagiarism: R. Abraham Kalmankes’ Ma’ayan Ha-Hokhmah

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1. The Accusation. Rabbi Joseph Samuel ben R. Zvi (d. 1703) – more popularly known as ר’ שמואל ר’ חיים ר’ ישעיה’ס – served as a member of the rabbinic court in Cracow for some 26 years, after which he was appointed Chief Rabbi of Frankfurt in 1689.1 An avid collector of books and manuscripts, he made good use of them in listing in the margins of his copy of the Talmud variant readings, emendations, and annotations to the text…

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Crafting the Commandments

Crafting the Commandments

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Scholars have ascribed far too much importance to Maimonides’ enumeration of the commandments and far too little to the motivations that lay behind his appropriation of R. Simlai’s aggadah as the basis for the enumeration and to the significance that Maimonides attached to this aggadah. The proximate reason for creating an enumeration was his need to have a reasoned and methodical outline of all Torah legislation in front of him, a reminder of topics to guide his preparation of the…

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New Seforim and books 2014

New Seforim and books 2014

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Although the world, has been shifting more and more to E- books, seforim and books are still being printed in full force in the Jewish world. What follows is a list of new seforim and books I have seen around in the past few months. Some of the titles are brand new others are a bit older. I am well aware that there are new works worth mentioning that are not included. Due to lack of time I cannot keep…

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Asufah of Rabbi Shmuel Ashkenazi

Asufah of Rabbi Shmuel Ashkenazi

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אסופה, ארבעה מאמרים מאוצרות הר”ש אשכנזי שליט”א [‘העלם דבר וטעות סופר’, ‘הגונב מן הספר’, ‘הרמב”ם כמתרגם מלשון התלמוד ללשון המשנה’, ‘מילונות עברית כיצד’?], ערך והשלים והביא לבית הדפוס, יעקב ישראל סטל, בהשתתפות אליעזר יהודה בראדט, כריכה רכה, 166 עמודים. It is with great pleasure that I announce the release of another volume of Rabbi Shmuel Ashkenazi’s work- Asufah. As I have written in the past, we are trying to print the collected material Rabbi Ashkenazi has written over a seventy…

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Tobacco and the Hasidim and a Comment on Artscroll

Tobacco and the Hasidim and a Comment on Artscroll

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has just appeared. The Seforim Blog is happy to present the following excerpts from the book. (The Note on Artscroll is part of a longer article.) Tobacco and the Hasidim and a Comment on Artscroll Louis Jacobs References in literature to the use of tobacco by hasidic Jews are numerous . Although there is little direct evidence to indicate how widespread it was, the references suggest it was fairly extensive. Let us examine some of these. In his autobiography Solomon…

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