In Penn’s Libraries, one can find a particular battle-scarred volume. It is a large folio, rebound in old leather, damaged by fire, with margins cut, pages torn out, others stolen but then replaced, marked by a few clever patches to the parchment. There are marginal notes in a variety of inks and handwritings representing many generations of readers and amenders. It is a late thirteenth–early fourteenth-century Mahzor, or Jewish prayer book for the high holidays, originating from the German Rhineland.

JQR 111.2 is now available, online* and in print. 

In this issue:

Ayelet Hoffman Libson argues that the Tosefta’s novel institution of blessings over commandments served a legal and political function, denoting legal personhood and delineating the borders of the community.

JQR 111.1 is now available, online* and in print. 

In this issue:

JQR 110.3 is now available, online* and in print. 

In this issue:

Moshe Simon-Shoshan shows how Rashi’s story about the death and downfall of a woman named Beruriah attests to the rabbis’ own anxieties about the place of women in halakhah.

JQR 110.2 is now available, online* and in print. 

In this issue:

"Do not be saddened or troubled, good sister. Your brother will die today as a good Jew." These are the words reportedly spoken by a fourteenth-century mendicant friar, just before taking his own life. He had declared his conversion to Judaism, and despite his sister’s tearful entreaties, he chose a public and violent death over forcible return to his order. One Avraham ben Avraham Avinu, whose dramatic and literally iconoclastic antics made him the subject of at least three contemporary reports, did the same.

It is summer, and as the fortunate among us head to familiar summer haunts—redolent with the smell of hedgerows and the feeling of warm earth under bare feet, once again appreciating sundown and turning the pillow to the cool side—it seems apt to reflect on the many ways in which travel is something quite qualitatively different from movement through space.