An Index to Digitized Material Online and Ha-Tikvah
As is apparent to anyone who tried to use the links in my recent post on books digitized by Microsoft’s Live Search, accessing digitized books that have been posted online isn’t always very successful. One step towards making it easier is Internet Archive. Internet archive was founded “with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.” See their FAQ for the details about their work. Using Internet Archive one can access all different types of media that can be found on the internet through searching their archives. Here are a few treats that I found, especially no. 4. It is a gold mine for lovers of knowledge, and I recommend doing some searching around the archive.
1. Samson Raphael Hirsch, “The Talmud : its relation to Judaism and the attitude of the Jews towards society” (here)
2. Max Margolis, A manual of the Aramaic language of the Babylonian Talmud (here)
3. Michael Guttmann, Erets Yisrael ba-Midrash ve-Talmud (here)
4. Naftali Hertz Imber (Yes, that Naftali Herz Imber.), “The letters of Rabbi Akiba, or, The Jewish primer as it was used in the public schools two thousand years ago” (here). This documents probably deserves its own post. It is a translation of אותיות דרבי עקיבא. See here for information on this work and here for the text. This translation by Imber was published by the United States Bureau of Education in 1896. I haven’t read through it or looked into it, but it probably deserves more attention.
5. E.E. Urbach, Die Entstehung und Redaktion unserer Tossafot (here). Written by Urbach at the young age of 25, this formed the kernel of what later became his discussion of התוספות שלנו (“Our Tosafot“), i.e. the Tosafot that are found on the printed page of the Talmud, in his book Ba’alei ha-Tosafot. J.N. Epstein reviewed this book in Tarbitz, vol. 8 and Yaakov Sussman feels that Epstein’s review is still one of the most important attempts to examine Urach’s theories regarding the Tosafot and their genesis. For more see Sussman’s bio-bibliographic treatment of Urbach pp. 16-17, 33-55.
Shabbat Shalom.