Taking a minor detour from his work as an intellectual historian with an interest in early modern skepticism, philosophy, and medicine, Ahuvia Goren unearths a rather astounding woman from the archives: Rica Clava (Rivkah Katzigin), a whip-smart and outspoken advocate for her own marital property, who not only wrote in Hebrew, but was conversant in Jewish law.
JQR 115.2 is now available, online and in print.
In this issue:
Christian Stadel identifies a Syriac source for a passage in the Aramaic Scroll of Antiochus, thereby characterizing the text as a more complex composition than previously assumed.
One wants the best for one’s friends and colleagues—really one does—but sometimes our goodwill is tested, as it was when Anne Oravetz Albert told us she was leaving her role as executive editor of JQR to accept a new job. She leaves behind a gaping hole.
When a Spanish researcher announced in a documentary last fall that he had identified Columbus’s remains in Seville Cathedral—and that genetic analysis revealed he was Jewish—the story spread through international media like a viral tweet. But the science behind it relied on questionable methodologies.
Sam Shuman’s essay Of Mice and Hasidic Men: Reb Shayele as Populist Patron Saint in our latest issue opens new worlds of understanding at the juncture of faith, magic, and Haredi popular culture. The article unveils the remarkable story of an ultra-Orthodox figure known as Reb Shayele (né Yeshaya Steiner in 1851 near the Hungarian-Galician border).
Founded in 1889, JQR spent nearly two decades in England before moving to Philadelphia in 1908 under new editorship. Peruse the contents of these early issues—now called the Old Series—and you’ll find Jewish literature in English translation among the journal’s early output. Translations ranged from Talmud to contemporary poetry and drew from Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, and more.
Women are real. At least so women think, most of the time, but more than other human people women are also imaginary creatures—figments—constructed by cultural and linguistic fantasy, myth and literature. All this we know, as women, as readers of texts, and viewers of art, and consumers of culture in nearly all its forms, and it is no less of a factor in scholarship. It is not always easy to tell the dancer from the dance.
JQR 115.1 is now available, online and in print.
In this issue:
The following is adapted from Anne Albert’s introduction to the forum in our pages.
The rabbis have a deep distrust of individual authority, deferring to the rabbinic collective, for example, and not the inspired prophet. Even individual rabbinic authority is rhetorically mediated in the corpus through meaning-conferring, and meaning-controlling, layers of paideia and performed deference to previous authorities, inherited wisdom, and the sacred text.