Philologos
By Philologos
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News The Assassins: Part II
Where were we? Ah, yes: With the ninth-century Qarmatians in southern Iraq. In 899 they actually founded an independent state on the Persian Gulf under the leadership of Hamdan Qarmat’s disciple Sa’id al-Hasan al-Jannabi. For a century this state staged bloody raids on neighboring principalities as far off as Syria. Eventually, the Qarmatian state was…
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News Hash Heads
Aaron Demsky writes from Ramat Gan, Israel: Apropos of your [April 11] piece entitled “Thugs and Bandits,” perhaps you might want to discuss the word “assassin,” too. A fascinating word, indeed, “assassin” — and one that, though its history goes back nearly a thousand years, relates to today’s headlines in some interesting ways. “Assassin” comes…
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News The First and Last Drops
A soft rain is falling outside my window. Possibly, it is the last, since this is the time of year when the rains in Israel stop and do not resume until the following autumn. This is why, in the Shemoneh Esreh or “Eighteen Benedictions” prayer recited three times daily, there is a difference of wording…
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News A Sudden Revelation
Michael Brown sends an interesting query from Toronto. “Can someone,” he asks, “have an epiphany in Yiddish? I have asked around, and no one has been able to provide a Yiddish word or even an expression that incorporates ‘epiphany’ and its social, spiritual and intellectual connotations.” I should begin my answer to Brown’s question by…
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News No Simple Answer
‘The best kashe is kasha with gravy,” goes an old pun about the Passover Seder’s Four Questions, which are known in Yiddish as the fier kashes — a pun based on the word kashe in Yiddish meaning both buckwheat grits and a question. And yet a kashe is not an ordinary question. If you ask…
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News Of Thugs and Bandits
‘A bunch of thugs,” General Tommy Franks has called the irregular forces fighting against the coalition army in Iraq. The Iraqi regime and much of the Muslim world, on the other hand, calls them shuhada, “martyrs,” and feda’in, “redeemers” or “self-sacrificers,” i.e., Islamic commandos. This is hardly the first time in history that irregulars have…
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News Fifty Days and Fifty Nights
‘Fierce desert weather, even more than the stubborn pockets of [Iraqi] resistance, conspired to slow the allied advance,” wrote John Kifner, reporting from southern Iraq, in last week’s International Herald Tribune. “The sandstorm, reaching the level of a hamsin, the brown dust that blots out all vision in the desert, began during the night…. By…
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News The Politics of Repair
When a Hebrew expression that was unknown in the English language 20 years ago appears not once but twice in a column by Thomas Friedman about the war on Iraq, on the editorial page of The New York Times, that’s a linguistic success story. The expression is tikkun olam (pronounced “tee-KOON oh-LAHM”), and I don’t…
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