Genizah fragment with Maimonides’ signature.

Sifting the Cairo Genizah

Everyone knows about the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered over 60 years ago, and about the new light they shed on the sectarian Judaism of late antiquity, the beginnings of rabbinic Judaism, and possibly the prehistory of Christianity. Fifty years before that, the Cairo Genizah similarly revolutionized the picture of the Jewish Middle Ages.

Digitizing the Genizah  Friedberg Genizah Project.  Since 2004, a concerted program has been identifying, cataloguing, and transcribing the manuscripts of the Cairo Genizah as well as photographing and publishing them online.  SAVE

What the Geonim Wrought  Robert Brody,  Printing the Talmud.  For roughly 500 years, the cultural and intellectual centers of the Jewish world were located east of the Mediterranean, and the master teachers of the age devoted themselves to transmitting, explicating, and applying the Talmud as a guide to Jewish life. (PDF)  SAVE

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Chagall, "The Praying Jew," 1914.

Three Blessings

The Jewish prayer book (siddur) is thick with texts: blessings, thanksgivings, and petitions, instructions, theological claims, and historical memories. Some traditional texts bear especially outsized burdens. In this respect, few can rival three lines that begin "Blessed are you O God, King of the Universe, Who has not made me . . . " and conclude, respectively, "a goy [Gentile]," "a slave," and "a woman."

Benedictions of Identity  Joseph Tabory,  Bar-Ilan University Press.  On the three blessings and efforts by traditionalists to adapt them to contemporary circumstances (originally published in Kenishta: Studies of the Synagogue World). (PDF, 2001)  SAVE

“. . . Who Made Me a Woman”  George Jochnowitz,  Commentary.  A startling variant of a controversial blessing appears in a 14th-century vernacular prayer book from southern France. (PDF, 1981)  SAVE

As I Am  Philologos,  Forward.  On the morning blessings and the two Hebrew words for "Jew."  SAVE

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Skeletons in the Closet of Hasidism

Popular demands for transparency in our institutions and the availability of technological means to achieve it have made it hard to keep secrets. This has affected the conduct not only of government and business but also of religion.

Scandal in the Family  Yair Sheleg,  Haaretz.  David Assaf's book about figures and episodes out of the past history of Hasidism carries clear implications for the movement's present and future as well. (2006)  SAVE

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Baruch Spinoza.

Secularism and Its Discontents

The transformations of Jewish life in the last two-and-a-half centuries still boggle the mind. Deep ruptures opened to separate the present from the past, modernity from tradition, setting terms that have defined the contours of Jewish life until today. How did people try to think their way through the change?

Is Jewish Secularism Possible?  Rebecca Goldstein,  MyJewishLearning/Bronfman Foundation.  Secular Jewishness can ground itself in the extraordinary contributions that the Jewish people have made and have yet to make to human flourishing as a whole.  SAVE

Rethinking Secularism  David N. Myers,  University of Pennsylvania Library.  An online exhibition devoted to the complex interplay between the religious and the secular in modern Jewish history.  SAVE

An Incomplete Sketch  Yehouda Shenhav,  Haaretz.  A new Hebrew encyclopedia of Jewish secularism suffers from intellectual thinness and ideological blinders.  SAVE

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Talmud, Amsterdam 1740.

The Persian Talmud

A recent gathering of scholars who have been intensely researching the buried treasures of "Irano-Judaica," together with the release of a volume titled The Talmud in its Iranian Context, underscores one of the most exciting developments in Jewish studies: the effort to put the "Babylonia" back into the Babylonian Talmud.

The Talmud in Context  Yaakov Elman,  Printing the Talmud.  The Bavli was not written in a ghetto; nor was it studied and transmitted in isolation.  SAVE

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