Wickes was born in Dover, England, on August 15, 1817, and went on to study mathematics at Cambridge. After finishing Cambridge, he went to Canada and taught mathematics at a number of institutions. While in Montreal, he was ordained as a deacon, and later a priest. In 1854 he returned to England. Tunkel writes,

In 1856 he moved to the job which was to enable him to achieve his life’s work. He went to London to work for the Colonial and Continental Church Society (subsequently the Commonwealth and Continental, and now the Intercontinental). The Society’s main purposes were establishing and ministering to Anglican congregations in the colonies and mainland Europe, corresponding with them, visiting and supporting them, and providing them with chaplains. He was appointed one of several of the Society’s Association Secretaries. So for the next seven years he had the opportunity to travel all over the Continent in search and scrutiny of all the extant sources of the vocalised Bible text. In 1863 he was promoted to be the Secretary of the Society. That presumably kept him at headquarters in London; we may assume that by then he had all the source-material and could begin to collate and draw conclusions.
(p. 108)

He then returned to Canada, and had a number of teaching positions, both in Bible and mathematics. He eventually returned to England, and in 1881 published A Treatise on the Accentuation of the Three so-called Poetical Books on the Old Testament, Psalms, Proverbs, and Job. In 1887 he then published A Treatise on the Accentuation of the Twenty-one so-called Prose Books of the Old Testament. Wickes died on October 17, 1903, at the age of 86. Again from Tunkel,

The above details of his life give little clue of how and when he acquired his extensive knowledge of Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic and Syriac; or, indeed, what it was that originally inspired him as a mathematician and cleric to pursue this unlikely and arcane interest. Various contemporaries refer generally to his scholarship but say nothing of its content or breadth. One may guess that after having established himself in Canada, his return in 1855 to England, when approaching 40 and to poorly-paid employment, must have been motivated by his need for time and opportunity to pursue his manuscript studes.
(p. 109)

Tunkel quotes Aron Dotan who wrote,

Whatever flaws we may have found in Wickes’s work do not in the least detract from the fundamental value of his enormous achievement.

We thank Wickes for his work, and Victor Tunkel for helping give this important man the acknowledgement that he deserves.

On a tip from an e-mail listserv, some clips from interviews with R. Abraham Joshua Heschel.

The installation ‘bios [bible]‘ consists of an industrial robot, which writes down the bible on rolls of paper. The machine draws the calligraphic lines with high precision. Like a monk in the scriptorium it creates step by step the text.

…

Starting with the old testament and the books of Moses ‘bios [bible]’ produces within seven month continuously the whole book. All 66 books of the bible are written on rolls and then retained and presented in the library of the installation.

See here for the full post with more information. This raises other issues than a silk-screen Sefer Torah, maybe similar to machine-made matzah that is to be used for fulfilling the mitzvah of eating matzah, but it seems like an interesting question.

To understand Bob Dylan’s impact as a singer, you have to imagine a world without Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Kurt Cobain, Lucinda Williams or any other vocalist with a cracked voice, dirt-bowl yelp or bluesy street howl. It is a vast list, but so were the influences on Dylan, from the Talmudic chanting of Allen Ginsberg in “Howl” to the deadpan Woody Guthrie and Lefty Frizzell’s murmur. There is certainly iron ore in there, and the bitter cold of Hibbing, Minnesota, blowing through that voice. It’s like a knotted fist, and it allows Dylan to sing the most melancholy tunes and not succumb to sentimentality. What’s interesting is that later, as he gets older, the fist opens up, to a vulnerability. I have heard him sing versions of “Idiot Wind” where he was definitely the idiot.

Hebrew is alive and well. At least in the Arab and Druze communities. For students from those sectors, the Hebrew language has become the new business administration - a social and professional catapult to get ahead and succeed in life. The sticklers add Hebrew literature, too. It’s a triumph of practicality over ideology. The traditional attitude that language is part of national identity and that to study Hebrew is to cross the line, has given way to the quiet conquest of the Hebrew Language Department - at the University of Haifa by Arabs from the north and at Ben-Gurion University by Bedouin from the south. The graduates are almost always assured of a teaching job, which brings with it a livelihood, honor and prestige, relatively speaking. Hebrew is obligatory in every Arab and Bedouin elementary and high school, and good teachers are in high demand. “To be a high-school teacher is fine, respectable work,” says Ta’ir Kizel, from Maghar, a Druze-Muslim-Christian village in Galilee. “To the credit of the patriarchal society, it still retains a little glory for teachers. Some people found my choice strange. ‘What will you do with Hebrew language?’ they asked. Today, in retrospect, I can say that I succeeded and that many of my students want to follow in my footsteps and study Hebrew language at the university. But my ambition is to continue in academe and do a PhD in Hebrew language.”

The article examines a number of different aspects of this phenomenon, such as the motivations of some some of the students, and some university administrators who aren’t so happy about this influx of students. See here for the full article.

Polish-born and half-Jewish, Balinska, who works at the BBC in London, tells us that the boiled and baked bagel as we know it comes from her homeland. She tells the story of the Krakow bagel, which was a product of the 1683 Battle of Vienna. Although the story is completely speculative and perhaps even fictitious, it is a piece of gastronomic lore that has endured throughout the ages. As the story goes, 17th-century Poland was the breadbasket of Europe, and King Jan Sobieski was the first king not to confirm the decree of 1496 limiting the production of white bread and obwarzanek (bagellike rolls whose name derives from a word meaning “to parboil”) to the Krakow bakers guild. This meant that Jews could finally bake bread within the confines of the city walls. Furthermore, when Sobieski saved Austria from the Turkish invaders, a baker made a roll in the shape of the king’s stirrup and called it a beugel (the Austrian word for stirrup). As Balinska says, “Whatever its origin, the story of the bagel being created in honor of Jan Sobieski and his victory in Vienna has endured.”

See here for the full review, and here and here for other ones. The bagel has gotten a lot of attention by rabbis, usually because of the question of which blessing is said on it. The quick, and to many, the correct answer, would be ha-motzi, since it is bread. But because a true bagel, not those bad imitations, is boiled before it is baked, some have held that the blessing said on it should be mezonot. In addition, one can find “mezonot bagels/bread,” i.e. bagels which are made with fruit juice instead of water. Some discussions of the bagels and its appropriate blessing can be found here, here , here, and here.

A quick search on the Bar-Ilan Responsa program turned up discussions about bagels in Igrot Moshe YD II, no. 33; YD IV, no. 4. Both of these responsa contain interesting discussions. In the first one, Rav Moshe entertains the possibility of buying bagels from a bakery which does not seem to have rabbinic supervision. In his opinion, it all depends on whether you can trust the owner’s statement that there is no animal fat in the bagel. From my own experience, I once asked this of a bagel store owner and he looked at me like I was from Mars. He said that a bagel is just flour and water, although some of these bagel recipes do include margarine, butter, or oil. In the second responsum, Rav Moshe admits that there was a typo in the first one.

Rav Tzair also has a post about what happens when a Sefer Torah falls. In addition to his discussion and this responsum to which he links, see this responsum by R. David Golinkin.