In the spring issue of JQR (JQR 115.2), Christan Stadel takes a look at the Scroll of Antiochus (aka: Hanukkah Scroll, the Greek Scroll, or the Book or Scroll of the Hasmoneans), which tells the Hanukkah story. This text first appears in Babylonian sources and is preserved in several languages, appearing as part of the holiday liturgy in the geonic Middle Ages and beyond. 

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.

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.