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.
JQR 114.4 is now available, online and in print.
In this issue:
How do you remember things? Memories are stored in the mind, of course: we make “mental notes,” set long lists to song, use practice drills, and more. But how does it work, exactly? Where do memories reside; how are they created and retrieved when needed; and what relationship do they have to body and soul? These are questions that ancient and medieval thinkers pondered for both theoretical and practical reasons, in a tradition of ars memorativa.
The state of a nation’s press—its health or repression, its distance from or intimacy with organs of power—is a reliable bellwether of modernity. Newspapers routinely function as self-professed diagnosticians of culture and antidotes to its ills, even as they are themselves inescapably symptoms. In Daniel Amir’s essay in the summer issue of JQR, he looks at the explosion of press activity in Iran following the Allied occupation in 1941.