Marc B. Shapiro convincingly shows why we should doubt the veracity of R. Baruch ha-Levi Epstein’s description of his conversations with his aunt Rayna Batya. Also see this post at Ishim ve-Shitot which was written in response to Shapiro’s original post.
There is a recent post at Seforim which among many interesting topics, discusses some opinions as to “How much effort should people put into learning?,” or maybe more appropriately, “How much effort do people put into learning?” In medieval Ashkenaz, more than one teacher complained about both their students and the general level of learning. [...]
An interesting episode in Koranic scholarship. A few salient points. First, it seems that scholars of rabbinic literature from Hebrew University aren’t the only ones who keep their scholarly research hidden. Second, the theory that parts of the Koran were originally written in Syriac is interesting. I recently linked to an interesting book on early [...]
In response to a post on Ben Sira at Ancient Hebrew Poetry, Iyov brought a story found in the Alphabet of Ben Sira which describes Ben Sira’s lineage. One should read it to get the full story. What is interesting from the viewpoint of the history of halakhah is the role which this story played [...]
PhiloBiblos has posted about an expansion in the libraries available via Library Thing. I wasn’t familiar with Library Thing so I took a look at it. It is an on-line cataloging system for your library, but it is also more than that. It is similar to a Facebook or Myspace for books and readers. You [...]
Some may remember my post about a person complaining that there was no menorah at McDonald’s. Not surprisingly, most of the letters-to-the-editor, which can be found here, thought that it was quite a ridiculous complaint. While not McDonald’s, one thing that my wife and I found interesting in Costa Rica was that there is a [...]
My wife and I just got back from a trip to Costa Rica, and I was finally able to go through the dozens of emails and blog posts which were waiting for me upon our return. There have been some very interesting posts by a number of people in the last week or so. First, [...]
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