Review of Jay R. Berkovitz’s The Pinkas of Metz

Review of Jay R. Berkovitz’s The Pinkas of Metz

Comments 3 comments

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…

Read More Read More

Neturei Karta; ArtScroll, Arius, and Orangutans; Suicide and the Law of Rodef

Neturei Karta; ArtScroll, Arius, and Orangutans; Suicide and the Law of Rodef

Comments 86 comments

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…

Read More Read More

Elul Sale Announcement: Twelve Seforim recommendations

Elul Sale Announcement: Twelve Seforim recommendations

Comments 0 Comment

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…

Read More Read More

Parchments Burning, Letters Soaring, and Books Lost and Found: S.Y. Agnon’s Library Fire 100 Years Later

Parchments Burning, Letters Soaring, and Books Lost and Found: S.Y. Agnon’s Library Fire 100 Years Later

Comments 4 comments

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…

Read More Read More

Review of Ha-Sefer ha-Kollel (Kitāb al-Ḥāwī) by Rabbi David ben Saʿadya al-Ger

Review of Ha-Sefer ha-Kollel (Kitāb al-Ḥāwī) by Rabbi David ben Saʿadya al-Ger

Comments 3 comments

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….

Read More Read More

Will the Real Shas Kattan Please Stand Up

Will the Real Shas Kattan Please Stand Up

Comments 23 comments

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….

Read More Read More

Organizing the Mitzvot and the Sefer Ha-Chinukh

Organizing the Mitzvot and the Sefer Ha-Chinukh

Comments 4 comments

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…

Read More Read More

Apostomos Now: Contemporary Conjectures on a Classic Conundrum

Apostomos Now: Contemporary Conjectures on a Classic Conundrum

Comments 14 comments

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…

Read More Read More

A Young Man Holding a Torah Scroll and a Young Woman Holding a Book: The Life and Afterlife of Two Illustrations

A Young Man Holding a Torah Scroll and a Young Woman Holding a Book: The Life and Afterlife of Two Illustrations

Comments 6 comments

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…

Read More Read More

The Haftarot in the1806 Lopez Calendar

The Haftarot in the1806 Lopez Calendar

Comments 6 comments

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…

Read More Read More

Franciscans and More; “Repulsive” Practices; Saul Lieberman, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg

Franciscans and More; “Repulsive” Practices; Saul Lieberman, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg

Comments 26 comments

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…

Read More Read More

Book Week 2024

Book Week 2024

Comments 1 comment

Book week recently began in Eretz Yisrael. Continuing with my now Seventeenth year tradition B”h, every year in Israel, around Shavuos time, there is a period of about ten days called Shavuah Hasefer – Book Week. Many of the companies offer sales for the whole month. Shavuah HaSefer is a sale which takes place all across the country in stores, malls and special places rented out just for the sales. There are places where strictly “frum” seforim are sold and…

Read More Read More

From Kitzingen to London, From Berlin to Boston Charting the Pathways of an Intriguing Siddur Translation

From Kitzingen to London, From Berlin to Boston Charting the Pathways of an Intriguing Siddur Translation

Comments 9 comments

The vast library of Koren English-language Siddurim generally follow the same translation of the prayers, authored by the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, including “The Koren Siddur” (Sacks, 2009),” The Koren Soloveitchik Siddur (2011), “The Magerman Edition” (Goldmintz, 2014), “Zimrat Ha-Aretz Birkon” (2015), ”Birkon Mesorat Harav” (Hellman, 2016), “Rav Kook Siddur” (2017), and others. Of note is their translation of Psalm 37:25, the penultimate verse of the Grace After Meals: “Once I was young, and now I am old, yet I…

Read More Read More

Life After Death: The Afterlife of Tombstone Inscriptions in the Old Jewish Cemetery of Vilna

Life After Death: The Afterlife of Tombstone Inscriptions in the Old Jewish Cemetery of Vilna

Comments 12 comments

The ultimate purpose of any Jewish cemetery is to provide a resting place, with dignity, for the Jewish dead. Jewish law and custom have played a major role in regulating almost every aspect of burial from the moment of death through the funeral itself, the period of mourning that follows the funeral, and – ultimately – the erection of a tombstone over the grave. Once the tombstone is in place, the living return to the cemetery for occasional visits, usually…

Read More Read More

Hidden Treasures in Jewish Medical History at the British Library: A Post Cyber-Attack Homage

Hidden Treasures in Jewish Medical History at the British Library: A Post Cyber-Attack Homage

Comments 1 comment

On October 28, 2023, the British Library (BL) fell victim to one of the worst cyber-attacks in British History. Though its precious holdings thankfully remained physically unperturbed, access by scholars across the globe to the online catalog of its massive and formidable collection, some 170 million items, was disrupted. This incident shook the world’s bibliophiles to the core, and its impact on the academic community is both inestimable and ongoing. From a Jewish perspective, the BL houses one of the…

Read More Read More