Nazim Sattar writes about “The Maldives and “the beginning of the season”: can we guess the sailing month mentioned in Madmūn b. Ḥasan’s letter?” in the Fragment of the Month via the blog of the T-S Genizah Research Unit.
Category Archives: Digital Humanities
Middle Ages for Educators (MAFE) Special Series: Jewish Life in the Middle Ages
Curated by Elisheva Baumgarten, Maya Soifer Irish, Marcia Kupfer, and Asa Mittman, this project aims to create a series of enriching, open-access resources (OARs) on medieval Jewish life for students, instructors, and the general public.
A new video by Diane Wolfthal (Rice University) explores illustrated Yiddish manuscripts from the 15-16th centuries.
A fragment of a piyyut by Qilliri for Yom Kippur from the Collection of Yeshiva University
Read this new Fragment of the Month post about “A fragment of a piyyut by Qilliri for Yom Kippur from the Collection of Yeshiva University” by Shulamith Berger, Joseph Ginsberg, and Aaron Koller.
Unraveling a Genizah Mystery: New Insights into Saadia Gaon’s Biblical Commentary and Anti-Karaite Polemic
Read the new Fragment of the Month post by Yehuda Seewald about “Unraveling a Genizah Mystery: New Insights into Saadia Gaon’s Biblical Commentary and Anti-Karaite Polemic.”
The Jerusalem Talmud: The Beta Version of the Gemara
Read tihs article via the Librarians blog of the nationla Library of Israel.
Webinar on the Index of Jewish Art
The Center for Jewish Art “is offering a free introductory webinar on the Index of Jewish Art. This webinar is designed to help you effectively navigate the Index and utilize its diverse tools. It can also be integrated into course curricula and other group activities with students. For additional information, please reach out to Dr. Anna Berezin, Head of the Ritual and Ceremonial Section at the Center for Jewish Art, at anna.berezin@mail.huji.ac.il.”
Disruption and Resilience in Late Medieval Ashkenaz
New Book Volume for Dowload: Dialectics of Continuity and Discontinuity
Historians have long considered the later Middle Ages as a period of cultural decline in European Jewish history. As far as Ashkenaz is concerned, i.e., the area of the medieval German kingdom and its adjacent regions, pogroms and persecutions loom large in the memories of late medieval Jews and of modern historians – and rightfully so. At the same time, the first roots of later »rural Jewry« have been identified in htis very period. If we look closer, it appears that German towns and cities contined to play a role, too, even if Jews were often banned from in the major urban centers permanently and lived in nearby suburban spaces. Not least, the Ashkenazim who emigrated to northen Italy since the late-fourteenth century and to Poland during the fifteenth, laid the foundations for thriving early modern communities in these countries.
Continue reading Disruption and Resilience in Late Medieval AshkenazNew online programme in Heritage and Memory Studies
Read more about the new Heritage and Memory Studies degree of the University of Aberdeen, starting this September.
Database: Elyonim veTachtonim. System of Analysis of Supernatural Entities
Have a look at this new database, which “a customizable system of the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the textual accounts featuring supernatural entities understood according to the cognitive science of religion with an emphasis on the cognitive metaphors used in the description of their appearance and behavior, especially vis-à-vis human actors. The central tool of this analysis is the database, which functions primarily as a convenient thematic concordance and a repository of systematically annotated data.”
Posen Library User Testing Call for Participants
The Posen Library is seeking college-level instructors teaching survey courses in subjects that include Jewish history and culture in Fall 2024 to use content from the Posen Library website and report back on website functionality, content, and overall experiences with teaching material contained in the Library.