Tablet Magazine - a new read on Jewish life

The Russo-Ukrainian War Through a Historian’s Eyes

With a new Cold War emerging, can Israel continue to sit on the fence?

byYehuda Bauer

Her Name Was Luka

A stunning piece of scholarly detective work, aided by a new database, restores the identity of a Dutch Jewish hero of the Sobibor revolt

byAline Pennewaard

A Dictionary on Trial

A pioneering Romanian Jewish lexicographer finds out that his mastery of language isn’t enough to make him a citizen

byNatalie Zemon Davis

Her Name Was Luka

A stunning piece of scholarly detective work, aided by a new database, restores the identity of a Dutch Jewish hero of the Sobibor revolt

byAline Pennewaard

A Dictionary on Trial

A pioneering Romanian Jewish lexicographer finds out that his mastery of language isn’t enough to make him a citizen

byNatalie Zemon Davis

A German soldier interrogates Polish peasants in a bomb crater, 1939

Were ‘Ordinary Poles’ Perpetrators of the Holocaust?

Rescuing peasants under Nazi occupation from the condescension of history

byTomasz Frydel

Jews of Rage

The anger that fills the Yiddish original manuscript of Elie Wiesel’s ‘Night’ is muted in the book that became the classic account of the Holocaust for gentiles

byNaomi Seidman

Was the Holocaust Predictable?

The secularization of Europe ‘liberated’ the Jews while laying the foundations for genocidal antisemitism

byJacob Katz

The Man Who Saved My Grandfather

A war reporter visits Slovakia to meet the peasant-turned-doctor who risked his life to hide Jews

byDanny Gold

Jews of Rage

The anger that fills the Yiddish original manuscript of Elie Wiesel’s ‘Night’ is muted in the book that became the classic account of the Holocaust for gentiles

byNaomi Seidman

Was the Holocaust Predictable?

The secularization of Europe ‘liberated’ the Jews while laying the foundations for genocidal antisemitism

byJacob Katz

Ethiopian Jews and Their Sacred Scripture

The African Jewish holy books that the rabbis never read

byYaacov Gonchel

In the view of Ethiopian Jews, the Bible is not subject to the judgment and criticism of human reason, and the midrashic hermeneutic cannot generate new, binding norms. The text may not be ripped from its context and reinterpreted; following the long tradition of prophetic exhortations, the legacy from Sinai must be observed as is. Thus, for example, did Ethiopian Jews continue to bring the paschal sacrifice and paint their doorposts with its blood long after the destruction of the Temple....

Continue reading →︎

Kestenbaum and Company

A stereoscope card featuring photographs of the actor Adah Isaacs Menken (1835-68), an American actress known best for her performance in the melodrama Mazeppa based on the life of the Ukrainian legend Ivan Mazepa (1639–1709). The story goes that as a young man, he was caught in flagrante with a noblewoman, whose husband punished him by tying him naked to a wild horse. When the horse reached the Cossacks, Mazeppa became their military leader. The story underwent many adaptations, including one by the English poet Lord Byron and, in the United States, a melodramatic burlesque in which Menken played a female Mazeppa. Menken was the first American Jewish performer to cultivate an outrageous stage personality.

Miniature by Pierart dou Tielt illustrating the Tractatus quartus bu Gilles li Muisit (Tournai, circa 1353). The people of Tournai bury victims of the Black Death.

A Jewish Doctor Examines the Black Death

Abraham Caslari, 14th-century medical witness from Catalonia

bySusan L. Einbinder

Rabbenu Tam and the Silver Talons

Is falconry kosher?

byLeor Jacobi

A Feminist Avant La Lettre

Yalta

The Talmud reports that Yalta (the second most mentioned woman in the Talmud after the daughter of Rav Chisda) was a “bright spark,” educated by her father, and had “vast medical knowledge.” A story in Tractate Chulin describes a ruling she made for herself after challenging rabbis on an affair having to do with menstruation. As the scholar Mia Amram explains, Yalta’s record of “adjudicating for women’s issues, contradicting the highest regarded rabbis, and rewriting ancient laws to finally include women in Jewish practices” might maker her the first Jewish feminist.

The Men Who Gave What Wasn’t Theirs

A translation of colonial Spanish history into biblical Hebrew shows the trauma of 1492 through Jewish eyes

byCurt Leviant

Joseph Ha-Kohen (1496-1578), the historian and (like most other Hebrew men of letters in the Middle Ages), physician, is best known for his chronicle of persecutions of the Jews, “Emek Ha-Bakha” (Vale of Tears). He was born in Avignon, France, to parents who had fled the expulsion in Spain four years earlier, but grew up, studied, worked, and died in Italy. He knew Latin, was well-read, and had a vast knowledge of geography. In the following text he takes “The Book of the New India” (1553), a work by a contemporary Spanish writer, Francisco Lopez de Gomara, and translates it—more accurately, he translates, abridges, and occasionally even adds to it—so that his fellow Jews would gain knowledge of the recent discoveries of the New World....

Continue reading →︎

Unveiling the Ka’ba

A meditation on the coy symbolism of the shrine’s hidden truth

byElliot R. Wolfson

An altarpiece depicting Thomas Aquinas in Ascoli Piceno, Italy, by Carlo Crivelli, 15th century. With the rise of a wealthy merchant class in the 1100s, figures such as Saint Thomas of Aquinas looked for ways to make wealth moral.

The Christian Origins of Free Market Thought

Early thinkers sought to turn religious self-interest into a counterbalance to earthly greed

byJacob Soll

Unveiling the Ka’ba

A meditation on the coy symbolism of the shrine’s hidden truth

byElliot R. Wolfson

The Christian Origins of Free Market Thought

Early thinkers sought to turn religious self-interest into a counterbalance to earthly greed

byJacob Soll

Newsletter

Those who do not remember the past are ... probably not Jewish

Success! You have subscribed to the Tablet newsletter! Check your inbox for a confirmation message.

Something went wrong. Please enter your email address again.

Tablet Magazine; original images: Wikipedia; The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Rav Karo and the Holy City of Safed in the Context of Ottoman Law and Sufi Practice

The rabbi’s time in the city shaped his vision of Jewish law as a channel to salvation

byRoni Weinstein

R. Karo was first and foremost an impressive Talmudic scholar, unique even among the impressive group of rabbis and halachic arbiters of Safed and the Sephardic diaspora in the eastern Mediterranean. His codes of law contributed to the halachic renaissance of Sephardi scholarship in the 16th and (partially) 17th centuries. But he was not a regular scholar, as he combined an active and intense visionary and ecstatic life with his arduous and unceasing study of the immense “ocean” of Talmudic and post-Talmudic literature (Yam ha-Talmud). ...

Continue reading →︎

Thousands of Hebrew manuscript fragments were discovered in Central Europe, where they had been used by Christians to bind books

The Adas Affair

byAdi Schwartz

Thousands of Hebrew manuscript fragments were discovered in Central Europe, where they had been used by Christians to bind books

The seminal role that Felix Frankfurter enjoys in American Jewish history is riddled with irony: he shed his yarmulke long before donning his judicial robes.

The Adas Affair

byAdi Schwartz

The seminal role that Felix Frankfurter enjoys in American Jewish history is riddled with irony: he shed his yarmulke long before donning his judicial robes.

The Tab

Tablet’s weekly printable digest

Get it Every Friday here

sassoon splendour

Known as the Rothschilds of the East, the Sassoon family made its money in the cotton trade in Iraq and the opium trade in its more recent home in the United Kingdom. But they branched out. Rachel Sassoon-Beer was the editor-in-chief of The Observer and The Sunday Times and David Solomon Sassoon was an avid collector of Judaica. The Sassoon Codex will be auctioned off at Sotheby’s this month for a projected price of no less than 30 million. A new exhibit, “Through the Saga of the Sassoon Family,” is now on at the Jewish Museum.

Portrait of Rachel Sassoon-Beer (1858-1927)

National Portrait Gallery

Portrait of David Sassoon by artist William Melville

jewish museum

sotheby’s

wikimedia

In the early 1800s, no American trader smuggled more opium into China than Thomas Perkins. Known for aggressive risk-taking, Perkins commanded a global trading empire from his headquarters in Boston.

New England’s Opium Overlords

In the 1800s, a group of crafty traders amassed unimaginable riches on the back of Chinese exploitation

byJohn Haddad

The Yiddish Journalists of Argentina

byJavier Sinay

The Rebellion Against Rashi

byEric Lawee

The Floating Space City of the Jews

In a tradition preserved in the Babylonian Talmud, Jews unhappy with the Temple of Jerusalem imagined a mythological paradise rooted in Zoroastrian mythology instead

byDan Shapira

The Yiddish Journalists of Argentina

byJavier Sinay

The Rebellion Against Rashi

byEric Lawee