Philologos
By Philologos
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Culture Yes We Kana’i
Writing about the Zealots, the rebels who, according to Jewish historian Josephus Flavius (who lived from about 37 to 100 C.E), fought to the death in Jerusalem against the Romans in the Great Revolt of 67–70 C.E., which ended with the destruction of the Second Temple, Jay P. Mayesh of New York City asks: “*Zelotes…
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Culture Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu
Back at Passover time, I published a column about a facsimile edition of an early 19th-century French Haggadah from Bordeaux, one of whose interesting features was its use of “ngh” to represent the Hebrew letter *ayin. *This was once widespread in the Sephardic communities of Southern Europe, whose Hebrew pronunciation nasalized the pharyngeal glottal stop…
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Culture Mexican Flu: The Other White Meat
There’s not much that’s funny about swine flu, but ultra-Orthodox Knesset member Ya’akov Litzman, acting head of Israel’s health ministry, has given us some comic relief. Repeatedly referring to the disease at a press conference April 27 as the “Mexican flu,” Litzman studiously avoided all mention of “swine” as if the very word were nonkosher,…
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Culture Alack and Alas, We’ve Lost Our Glottal Stop
Andy Farber of Terre Haute, Ind., writes to ask, “What does zuchem vey mean?” “Zuchem vey” means nothing that I know of. But what Mr. Farber has undoubtedly heard is a slight garbling of Yiddish *s’iz okh un vey, *an expression that is easy to understand but not so easy to translate into contemporary English….
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Culture Shabbos Goy a la Mode
Not being a very ritually observant Jew, I needed the Home & Garden section of the April 9 New York Times, to which my attention was called by my wife, to teach me a new Jewish term I didnt know. This is “Sabbath mode,” and it has been around, so I subsequently learned, since 1997,…
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Culture Hot, Rare and Missed
James A. Goldman of New York writes to ask about Birkat Hachamah, the Blessing of the Sun — that once-in-28-years event in Jewish liturgy that, despite my best intentions, I slept through for the third time in my life when it was observed at sunrise Wednesday, April 8. As the sun peered over the horizon…
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Culture Honeyed, And Lighter Than Air
One of my fondest childhood memories of Passover is of my mother’s khremslakh, which were as easy to eat as they are difficult for the gutturally challenged to pronounce. (It’s done with the first and last consonants like the “ch” in Bach.) These matzo pancakes were different from the khremslakh — the singular is khremsl…
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Culture With Frog in Throat
Since one of the guests we will be having for our Seder this year is a native French speaker who knows no Hebrew, he will get to use a Haggadah in our possession that is a facsimile of an original published nearly 200 years ago. Its title page is printed in both Hebrew and French,…
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