Since the 19th century Talmud scholars have been writing about the Saboraic introductions to Talmudic tractates, a phenomenon already pointed out by Rav Sherira Gaon. See here for a recent discussion from a very good, although ridiculously expensive, book. It seems like there is still room for more to be written as an M.A. thesis [...]
The third part of Lee Levine on the Ancient Synagogue can be found here. (hat tip) See this earlier post on the subject.
Bar-Ilan UP has a few new titles. Prof. Tzvi Aryeh Steinfeld has published a new book, עם לבדד : מחקרים במסכת עבודה זרה. My guess is that this is a colleciton and reworking of the articles which he has published on this topic in the past. One can read online the table of contents and [...]
Microsoft’s Live Search Books is officially closing its doors (closing its links/portals?). It seems that they couldn’t make enough money to justify keeping it around. See more about it here. Hopefully centralized platforms such as the Internet Archive will get a boost from this.
A few days ago I read a blog post, where I can’t remember, that referred to one of the most famous song lines ever, “Freedom’s just another word for nothin else to lose.” That line is from Me and Bobby McGee. While made famous by Janis Joplin, the song was actually written by Kris Kristofferson, [...]
Just in time for my renewed interest in Hebrew grammar (a.k.a. learning all of the things which I never learned properly), Lion of Zion points us to a great blog on Biblical Hebrew grammar, Dikdukian. For those interested in learning about the subject a bit more, Codex has some great information and recommendations here about [...]
I have written before about R. Ovadiah Yosef’s attitude towards different customs, and this recently published book looks like it will be an interesting addition to the literature on the subject.
In January I attended a conference on Teaching Rabbinic Literature which was sponsored by the Mandel Institute at Brandeis University. They have now posted videos of most of the sessions online. There were a number of interesting sessions, including at least one, AFAIK, by a reader of this blog.
In a previous post I showed how a variant reading in the Talmudic text influences the way that the flow of the Talmudic argument is understood. I will now show how different interpretations of the text were the result of this variant reading. The text discussed is found on bKiddushin 80b. 1. נימא מתני’ דלא [...]
In the last chapter of Tractate Kiddushin there is a mishnah which discusses the limitations on people of the opposite sex being secluded alone (mKiddushin 4:12, bKiddushin 80b). One of the teachings is that a man should not be alone with two women. The Gemara notices a contradiction between the opinion brought in the Mishnah [...]
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