JQR 112.1 is now available, online* and in print.
In this issue:
Simcha Gross and Avigail Manekin-Bamberger introduce Aramaic incantation bowls that draw on rabbinic and elite literary sources, forcing a reevaluation of the “popular” religion traditionally ascribed to the bowls.
JQR 111.4 is now available, online* and in print.
In this issue:
Hair Dye
Wet Cat food
Bra, tights
Vodka
JQR 111.3 is now available, online* and in print.
In this issue:
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. (CAJS Rare MS 382).
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.
