Menachem Mendel

The great historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi z”l has passed away. Read what Menachem Butler has written here.

Posted on December 8th, 2009 under In Memoriam, Jewish History. Comments: 1

I just found out that Yochanan Muffs z”l passed away. He had been ill for many years and in the past few weeks his condition deteriorated. I think that Muffs is one of the few scholars who could appropriately be called a giant of biblical scholarship and theology. His writings range from [...]

Posted on December 6th, 2009 under Academia, Bible Studies, In Memoriam. Comments: 2

The influential French-Jewish anthropologist Claudé Levi-Strauss has died at the age of 100. Levi-Strauss influenced researchers in many fields and you can read here an introduction to his thought. See here and here for discussions of Levi-Strauss’s influence on biblical studies. Also see this article on his life and work from the [...]

Posted on November 3rd, 2009 under Academia, Bible Studies, In Memoriam. Comments: None

For more about this medal see here.

Posted on September 11th, 2009 under In Memoriam. Comments: None

The classicist Lionel Casson has passed away at the age of 94. While much of his work dealt with issues relating to ancient maritime history, a number of years ago he wrote a book on libraries in antiquity, Libraries in the Ancient World. It is a relatively short book and an easy read, [...]

Posted on July 27th, 2009 under Ancient History, Ancient Judaism, Bibliography, In Memoriam. Comments: 3

The important scholar of Early Christianity and Second Temple Judaism Martin Hengel has passed away. (hat tip) From the standpoint of scholarship about Judaism, Hengel was well-known for his book Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine During the Early Hellenistic Period. A short discussion of his views can be found [...]

Posted on July 5th, 2009 under Ancient Judaism, In Memoriam. Comments: None

Although I never studied with Rabbi Jay Miller z”l, I was able to study for a number of years with one of his students who did his best to transmit to us the Torah of his teacher. You can read some comments about him here and below is an announcement from the Web Yeshiva [...]

Posted on June 29th, 2009 under In Memoriam. Comments: None

We drove down into Memphis, the sky was hard and black
Up over the ridge came a white Cadillac
They’d drawn out all his money and they laid him in the back
A woman cried from the roadside “Ah he’s gone, he’s gone”
They found him slumped up against the drain
With a whole lot of trouble running through his [...]

Posted on June 25th, 2009 under In Memoriam, Popular Culture. Comments: None

Around the time when my grandfather left Poland (app. 1920), three of his uncles made their way to Palestine, eventually settling there. A number of years later, his grandparents also immigrated to Palestine. With the exception of a brother who came with him to America, his parents and the rest of his family [...]

Posted on May 24th, 2009 under In Memoriam. Comments: None