Philologos
By Philologos
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News The Jews of Old-Time Medina
Nathan P. Baker of Walnut Creek, Calif., has a query about the city of Medina in Saudi Arabia, the second-holiest site of Islam after Mecca. “I was quite surprised,” he writes, “to learn that it was a Jewish city, called Yathrib, long before the time of Muhammad. Could you furnish me, please, with the dates,…
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News Gallantly Grammatical
A promise is a promise. I ended last week’s column with the pledge to tell you why the Hebrew phrase ma’asei merkavah, “the doings of the chariot,” is sometimes humorously applied by political commentators in Israel to the process of forming coalition governments, such as the one just put together by Prime Minister Sharon, and…
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News Car Talk: Hybrids Rule
Ze’ev Orzech writes from Corvallis, Ore: I just read your column on the Swahili mistake of taking the syllable “ki” of kitabu [the Swahili word for “book,” from Arabic kitab] for a prefix. I had the opposite experience in Jerusalem some years ago. I had put my car in a garage to have various things…
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News Two Cheers for Daled
Forward reader Michael Katz writes: In a recent piece of yours, you referred to the fourth letter of the Hebrew alphabet as daled. I believe that the correct spelling is dalet, with the Hebrew letter tav as the word’s last consonant. I wonder why it is that Ashkenazim, who traditionally pronounce the final tav of…
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News An Omission, Not a Sin
Readers Roslyn Weiss, Menachem Kellner, Peretz Rodman, Martin Jaffee, Jacob Haberman, Gil Student and Michael Bohnen have written in about my January 17 column “Faithful or Fraudulent” — in which, analyzing the Mishna in Sanhedrin containing the statement, “Whoever saves a single Jewish life [nefesh mi-yisra’el] is said by Scripture to have saved an entire…
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News The Word in the Stone
Many of you have read by now of the “Jehoash inscription,” the black stone tablet with an ancient Hebrew text allegedly found by Palestinian workers while digging on the Temple Mount and purportedly dating to the reign of the Judean king Jehoash in the ninth century BCE. If this inscription is authentic, it would be…
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News Suffixgate
‘Kerngate: Body blow, not knockout,” said a front-page headline in the January 10 Jerusalem Post in an allusion to allegations of financial impropriety made against Prime Minister Sharon and his two sons in connection with money received by them from Anglo-Jewish businessman Cyril Kern. And now that we have a Jewish context to discuss it…
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News Faithful or Fraudulent?
‘Celui qui sauve une vie, sauve l’humanité entierè” (“Whoever saves a life, saves all of humanity”) is the headline of an interview with the son of Wladyslaw Szpilman, the prototype of the hero of the movie “The Pianist,” in the December 19 issue of the French Jewish weekly Tribune Juive. This noble sentiment, Andrzej Szpilman…
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