Dan at Seforim has posted a review of Kuntress Ha-Teshuvot He-Hadash with some important comments about the book. I am very interested in the responsa literature so hopefully this book will make it to my bookshelf soon. Being that I spent the last year trying to learn German, one of my summer projects is trying [...]
A while back I posted about the origins of the script which came to be known as “Rashi Script”. In the comments the question was raised as to when this script, Spanish semi-cursive, began to be identified by people as “Rashi Script”. According to Malachi Beit-Arié this name became common soon after the spread of [...]
Loyal blog reader J.B. brought to my attention a recent article by Elliot Horowitz entitled “On Self-Haters, Anti-Semites, and the Writing of History” in the recent issue of Tikkun. The first paragraph of the article is, “It is Sunday morning in Jerusalem. Rather than tackle yesterday�s crusty cholent pot awaiting me in the kitchen, I [...]
In Mishnah Yebamot 6:6 we read, “No man shall abstain from keeping the law Be fruitful and multiply, unless he already has children: according to the School of Shammai, two sons; according to the School of Hillel, a son and a daughter, for it is written, Male and female created he them. If he married [...]
In Haaretz there is, in my eyes, a moving and revealing article by the popular Israeli author Yochi Brandes. Yochi grew up in an ultra-orthodox home in Petah Tikva, eventually leaving the ultra-orthodox world. I admit to never having read any of her books, but before she began writing books our paths crossed a number [...]
While my feeling is that most of this blog’s readers who are interested in Hebrew manuscripts and books are familiar with Seforim and Hagahot, there are a number of blogs which discuss the non-Hebrew and non-Jewish issues of bibliography, books, and manuscripts that may be of interest to some. By far the best blog relating [...]
On this Yom Ha’atzmaut I thought some might be interested to read an article by David Golinkin about prayers that have been said for the government in general and also the Prayer for the State of Israel. As is his way, he provides a comprehensive overview of the literature and sources. Concerning the Prayer for [...]
In 1904 J.D. Eisenstein wrote in Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, “I beg to submit to the attention and consideration of this society a new source of research for historical information, namely the causistic literature known as Responsa works, to which American scholars constributed their share either in the form of Shaalot or [...]
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