A two-volume memorial volume has just been published for Prof. I.M. Ta-Shma. (hat tip) The book can be ordered from EliezerBrodt-at-gmail.com. It is nine hundred pages of research into liturgy, Jewish law, customs, history, etc.
The following question was published in today’s New York Times. (here) Q. I recently overheard a conversation about food in which someone mentioned “Jewish Champagne.” What is that? A. We’re going to assume the speaker was not referring to the French region, centered on Troyes, whose rabbinical scholars led an intellectual flowering in the 12th [...]
If you were wondering how Shasniks make fun of the Ashkenazi yeshiva world, see here for a “top-ten” list of requirements for acceptance into an Ashkenazi yeshiva. Here is one example from the list: תחילה יקבל הבחור על עצמו כי ראש הישיבה יהיה מעתה אביו הרוחני, מחשבתו תהיה כמחשבתו, ופיו כפיו. והריהו מקבל על עצמו [...]
Yekum Tarbut is a new Israeli website dedicated to Tarbut Ivrit. They have published a few articles (all in Hebrew) that may be of interest to readers of this blog. Jeffrey Woolf wrote about the synagogue in Ashkenaz. Now Yaron Leibowitz has begun a multi-part series (here) on the disagreement between Aryeh Morgenstern and Yisrael [...]
According to this entry at the JNUL, there is a new edition of Rabbi David Zvi Hoffman’s Melamed le-Hoil. This new edition is edited by his great-grandson, who also happens to have the name David Zvi Hoffman.
H-German has a review of two new books on Medieval European Jewry. The first book is Susan L. Einbinder, No Place of Rest: Jewish Literature, Expulsion, and the Memory of Medieval France. The second book is David Joshua Malkiel, Reconstructing Ashkenaz: The Human Face of Franco-German Jewry, 1000-1250. I finally arrived at the AJS conference [...]
Over at Gene Expression you can read an understandable discussion with neat graphics about the genetic background of Ashkenazi Jews. Some of the conclusions: 1) Jewish populations do have a common ancestral affinity. 2) But, that affinity is complemented by admixture with the populations amongst whom the Diaspora settled. 3) There is a suggestion that [...]
Whether Ashkenazim should continue to observe the prohibition of eating kitniyot on Passover has been discussed ad nauseam for quite some time. IMHO, do whatever you want and get over it. Personally, I eat any kitniyot which were not known in Ashkenaz during the 12-13th centuries, e.g. corn, when this custom took root and derivatives [...]
A new book by David Malkiel, Reconstructing Ashkenaz: The Human Face of Franco-German Jewry, 1000-1250 Reconstructing Ashkenaz shows that, contrary to traditional accounts, the Jews of Western Europe in the High Middle Ages were not a society of saints and martyrs. David Malkiel offers provocative revisions of commonly held interpretations of Jewish martyrdom in the [...]
In Haaretz there is a review of Haym Soloveitchik’s new book Ha-Yayin Bimei Ha-Beinayim, Soloveitchik’s book is a study of the subject of yayin nesekh (or “idolatrous wine,” that is, wine that has been touched by gentiles and is therefore forbidden to Jews) as it affected the day-to-day lives of medieval German Jewry. In the [...]
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