Where Did Yiddish Come From? The Tablet Longform newsletter highlights the best longform pieces from Tablet magazine.
Sign up here to receive bulletins every Thursday afternoon about fiction, features, profiles, and more. Solomon, Socrates and Aristotle. Pleading for her baby’s life, a woman kneels at the feet of King Solomon in 1 Kings 3:16–28.
This Roman wall painting from Pompeii is the earliest known depiction of a Biblical scene. Who commissioned this painting: a Jew, a Christian or a gentile? Photo courtesy Scala/Art Resource, NY Is it possible that the earliest existing picture of a scene from the Bible also includes the philosophers Socrates and Aristotle as onlookers? It is not only possible; I believe that is the case. The earliest depiction of a Biblical scene comes from a site that is perhaps better known to some for its erotic art than for its religious devotions: Pompeii. View.mail.rj. Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses By Séverine Sokol Discuss on Our Blog.
A Grisly Medieval Mystery - BBC News. British Philo-Semitism, Once and Future. Jews in Britain: A Chronology - Jewish Historical Society of England. The Queen’s Jewry. In the history of the British monarchy, there have been only two Diamond Jubilees. Last month, Elizabeth II celebrated sixty years on the throne. In 1897 Queen Victoria marked the same milestone. To mark Victoria’s Jubilee the communal leader and scholar Lucien Wolf published an article entitled “The Queen’s Jewry” that set out the progress that Jews had made during Victoria’s reign.
Church of England Doesn’t Like Pushy Jews. While Americans have successfully fought back against the attempts of Israel-haters to get mainline Christian churches here to support boycotts of the Jewish state, their English cousins are not as successful.
As Miriam Shaviv reports in the Times of Israel, the Church of England not only refused to back off its endorsement of a biased program that sought to indoctrinate Christians visiting the Middle East to support the Palestinians against Israel, many of its members took offense at the efforts of English Jews to get them to change their minds. This controversy showed the level of animosity for Israel that is entrenched in the culture of the state-supported Anglican hierarchy. But it also may betray the barely disguised anti-Semitism that runs through European and English discourse about Israel and Jews. Is Toulouse the Future of Europe? In March, an Islamist gunman in Toulouse, France, murdered three Jewish children as well as one of their fathers in a shooting spree outside of a school.
The crime was widely condemned (especially when at first it was thought to be the work of a neo-Nazi rather than a Muslim), but the link between this outbreak of deadly violence and the rising tide of anti-Semitic incitement throughout Europe was clear. Yet, rather than the murders signaling a turning point in the battle against Jew-hatred in France and Western Europe, it may have been just an indication that anti-Semitic incidents are becoming commonplace, a conclusion that has been reinforced by a shocking increase in attacks on French Jews since March.
The Crusades. The quest to recapture the Holy Land While the Crusades were a holy war against Muslims, the term “crusade” is also used more generally to mean a campaign against those who did not believe in the Christianity of the Church.
We Also Recommend. Was Columbus secretly a Jew? History of Jews in Ireland. The People of the Book on the Emerald Isle.
Jews have made their home in Ireland for centuries, and many have risen to be successful and prominent figures in politics, business, and theology. We Also Recommend. In Search of Vienna's Vanished Jewish Elite. Viennese pearls: Palatial residences in the City's Ringstrasse district c.1900 It was a history of meteoric rise and precipitous eclipse; a story with few parallels.
Exploring, Through Cheesecake, a Chapter in the Culinary History of Jews and France. A few months ago, my husband Allan and I stayed at the home of my friend Elisabeth Bourgeois, the chef of my most favorite Provençal restaurant, Le Mas Tourteron.
The last night of her season—the restaurant closes from November through February—we ate our way through her wonderful menu: a trio of salads (including cooked tomato salad, warm green been salad and a cucumber salad); guinea fowl from a neighboring farm rolled in an herb crust, and roasted shoulder of lamb coated with mustard and honey. Toward the end of the meal, the buffet cart was rolled out with tarte au citron, tarte au chocolat, œufs à la neige, and other delectable classic French desserts. And then I saw what looked like a creamy American cheesecake with a graham cracker crust beneath. I asked Elisabeth what it was.
“Oh,” she said, “that is a new dessert that our guests really like. I thought about this cake while wandering around Provence during my visit. What color was Rashi's shirt? Who said it and why? This will be my third post on the theme of "what color was Rashi's shirt" ( here's the first).
The motif goes something like this: "Academic historians of Judaism may know what clothing Rashi wore, but traditional scholars know what he taught. " Earlier I had quoted two versions. One deals with the color of Rashi's shirt, and the other with the brand of tobacco he smoked (and I playfully noted that the answer could only be none , since tobacco is an American crop and was unknown in Europe until 400 years after Rashi lived). Read the first post for the quotes, or the appendix at the very end where I include many versions. I am particularly interested in the attribution of the saying to Rabbi Jacob Ettlinger (1798-1871).
That is, he heard it in BMG, the Lakewood Yeshiva, in 1955. It isn't mentioned at all in Dr. In 1856 a commentary of Rabbi Hai Gaon on Taharot was published ( link ), and it contained corrections and notes from R. I would be remiss here if I did not mention R. 1. 2. Jewish bodies found in medieval well in Norwich. 23 June 2011Last updated at 02:35 There is evidence the children were thrown down the well after the adults The remains of 17 bodies found at the bottom of a medieval well in England could have been victims of persecution, new evidence has suggested.
The most likely explanation is that those down the well were Jewish and were probably murdered or forced to commit suicide, according to scientists who used a combination of DNA analysis, carbon dating and bone chemical studies in their investigation. British Philo-Semitism, Once and Future Menasseh ben Israel, with his (successful) 1655 petition to grant Jews the right to resettle in Britain. Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with public discourse about Jews in today's United Kingdom can be forgiven for viewing the term "British philo-Semitism" as an oxymoron. But, as the eminent historian Gertrude Himmelfarb shows in her brief book The People of the Book: Philosemitism from Cromwell to Churchill, the phenomenon of philo-Semitism was part of the "Jewish Question" that played a significant role in defining England from the 12th through the 20th centuries—and remains crucial to what Britain will become in the 21st.
Some of Their Best FriendsAnthony Julius, Standpoint. What Jews most need now are not more philo-Semites, though they are always welcome, but more anti-anti-Semites—that is, people ready to name and face down those contemporary forms of Jew-hatred that exploit or otherwise misappropriate liberal values. A Grisly Medieval MysteryAnthony Julius, BBC News. Jewish Expulsion from Portugal. Pirates and plague loomed, and prized possessions sold for a pittance. Decameron. France is still fractured by the Dreyfus Affair. Reformation Strasbourg. The Huguenots, the Jews, and Me : Azure - Ideas for the Jewish Nation. A tale of French philo-Semitism. Preview: My great-great-great-grandfather was named Moses. My cousins have names like Sarah, Deborah, Jeremy, Judith, Esther, Raphael, and Samuel.
My grandfather was hounded by the Gestapo in Paris, and put on a train to Dachau (he survived). My father and uncle have fond memories of their time as kibbutz volunteers in the early 1960s. Yet I do not (as far as I know) have a single drop of Jewish blood in my veins. The Huguenot Connection Isaac Casaubon, letter in his own hand. Jewish Moneylending. The profitable money business between Jews and Christians often became tense. Goodnight, Vienna The Jews of Vienna did not merely understand the world: they took Marx's point and changed it, too. From Freud's psychoanalysis to Wittgenstein's philosophy, from Mahler's music to Herzl's Zionism, this community made a unique contribution to modernity.
Yet our fascination with a handful of celebrities may blind us to the foundation on which their intellectual and artistic pre-eminence rested. The Cosmopolitans Simon Rawidowicz. How many flavors does Zionism come in?