Researchers from Cambridge have identified the author of an 10th century collection of biblical scriptures: Samuel ben Jacob, the same scribe who penned the Leningrad Codex. The Codex is the main Hebrew copy of the bible on which most modern translations are based. The manuscript contains sections from Prophets, Judges and Kings, and was likely…
— French authorities allocated approximately half a million dollars toward the preservation of what is believed to be Europe’s oldest known Jewish building. Restoration works are to begin in October to save the damaged parts of the Sublime House, which some historians believe was the seat of a 12-century yeshiva – a Jewish religious seminary — in…
Happy birthday Magna Carta! The iconic document was signed 800 years ago today — on June 15, 1215, — when the nobles forced King John of England to guarantee human and economic rights. Three clauses out of the historic document’s total 63 pertained to Jews. By this time, for more than a hundred years. In…
The people of Norwich, England have found some skeletons — not in their closets, but in a well. And the bones belong to Jews. The remains of 17 bodies dating to the 12th or 13th centuries were found at the bottom of a well in 2004 during an excavation for the construction of a shopping…
The Middle Ages were no holiday in the Catskills for the Jews of France. Yet a new study by Kirsten Fudeman, a professor of French at the University of Pittsburgh, conveys an unexpectedly upbeat message. “Vernacular Voices: Language and Identity in Medieval French Jewish Communities” (University of Pennsylvania Press), details medieval Jews’ persistent love of…
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