Philologos
By Philologos
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News Pursuing the ‘Rodef’
The rabbinic concept of din rodef is — unfortunately — back in the news. It last made the front pages at the time of the Yitzhak Rabin assassination. Two weeks ago it resurfaced — this time, in connection with the declaration of Avigdor Nebenzahl, the learned and respected rabbi of the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s…
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News Bendel Business
What do Madonna, Barbra Streisand, Britney Spears and Demi Moore have in common? Don’t tell me — yawn! — that all four are practicing kabbalists. That’s old news. No, all four have been spotted wearing bendels. The gossip columnists tell us that the latest to be seen with one is Moore, who has been appearing…
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News No Sex With Buildings…
I had never heard of an Italian Renaissance book entitled “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,”a Greco-Latin title rendered into English by the its recent translator, Joscelyn Godwin, as “Poliphilo’s Strife of Love in a Dream,” until I read a front-page article about it in the New York Times. Published in Venice in 1499, the Times said, the “Hypnerotomachia”…
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News Questioning the Marks
Ordinarily the Hebrew vowel signs are not headline material, but they made the front page of the newspaper Ha’aretz on June 4. The subject was a proposed spelling reform put forth by Dr. Mordecai Mishor, a member of the Language Committee of the Hebrew Language Academy — and although Dr. Mishor’s proposal will not lead…
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News ‘Peoplehood’ From the Jews?
I was writing an article the other day that had in it the phrase “Jewish peoplehood,” when my computer underlined “peoplehood” in red. That’s its smart-alecky way of telling me that I’ve misspelled a word or that it doesn’t exist. Although I knew the computer was wrong (its internal word list is small, and it…
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News Another ‘Da Vinci’ Mystery
‘Have you read ‘The Da Vinci Code’?” a friend asked me recently about the runaway best seller. “No,” I said. “Is it any good?” “It’s only the worst novel I’ve ever read,” my friend said. “But you might get a language column out of it. There’s a chapter there about an ancient Hebrew code called…
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News A New Mixed Marriage?
A few weeks ago, my wife and I attended a wedding in Israel — the exact ambience of which I couldn’t put a finger on. The bride and groom and their families both came from what is known in Hebrew as the dati-le’umi — the “national religious” community — the closest American Jewish equivalent of…
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News The Name Game
I had to go to the dictionary the other day when I received a book with the title of “These Are the Names: Studies in Jewish Onomastics.” “Onomastics,” it turns out (from Greek onoma, “name”), is “the study of the origin of names.” Published by Bar-Ilan University Press in Israel, “These Are the Names” is…
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