Me on the right

(Jewish lit theory guy seeing a Christmas tree for the first time) wow. Dickensian

poetic description of a bilingual manuscript from a lecture today: “naturally the Latin begins where the Hebrew ends”

Announcing my Jewishness by being the only guy in class to defend Freud

How late medieval Middle Eastern peasants adopted Arab cultural identities and formed village clans. Becoming Arab by Yossef Rapoport arrives next week on 18 November (13 Jan UK pub). Preorder yours today: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco... #History

Just found out about this amazing example of #manuscript #recycling . The whole manuscript is made up from the margins of an earlier liturgical manuscript, cut out and rearranged (hence the unusual format), the (mostly) blank margins then used to copy various magical texts in the mid 16th century.

This is more of a sneeze than a question. This is more of a yawn than a question. Hi thanks for your talk. This is more of a threat than a question

The future is satmar

Roommate listening to Oppenheimer soundtrack in the shower

Medieval angel roof boss

"Jonah and the Whale", Folio Probably from a Jami al-Tavarikh (Compendium of Chronicles) Persia, c. 1400 (Met Museum)

Graduate education at its best follows a kind of dream logic, and at its worst the logic of a paranoid conspiracy theorist. The rules of association in either case are functionally the same

Getting confused and wishing the hasidim an Eid Mubarak

9th century rabbi described posthumously by his students as "accustomed to amulets and whispers, and similar things"

55 EARTHEN CAULDRONS 55 COPPER POTS 55 ANDALUSI ROBES 55 RAW ANDALUSI CLOTHS 100 CLAY LAMPS 100 BAHARS OF SANDALWOOD 100 MANNS OF SILK 100 DINARS OF SILVER 100 SHEETS OF PAPER 55 BAHARS OF IRON 55 DAMASCENE SWORDS 55 BAHARS OF PEPPER 55 BAHARS OF CARDAMOM 155 BETEL NUTS

Earliest example of a lead funerary cross from pre-Conquest England: “On the 11th March 1063 departed out of this life Wlfmaeg, sister of Wlfric the Abbot”. St Augustine’s, Canterbury.

Not only does the name Yaḥyā occur in the Geniza letters, so does the Berber equivalent Yedder, in a letter dated 1038 AD - although not in a context that would tell us the bearer's religion. geniza.princeton.edu/en/documents... bsky.app/profile/rach...

regularly putting "journal 2 pages" and "read novel" on my to-do list to ensure I maintain a relationship with my soul over the next six years

the use of the phrase "exotic eastern landscapes" re: a memoir by Edward Said has to be intentionally ironic right

Impossible to go to LA without feeling like the Woody Allen character in Annie Hall

studying a language feels so good when you finally make it to the body horror unit

Slavoj Žižek offers keynote address “What is Violence?” at the Lockheed Martin annual Ideas Summit in Aspen

The Minotaur in the the labyrinth: we also see mentioned King Minos, the designer Daedalus, and his son Icarus Ghent University Library MS 92; Lambertus a S. Audomaro, Liber Floridus; 1121 CE; f.20r

Monumental three-volume Handbook of Epigraphic Cultures to be published by De Gruyter, early next year hopefully. Open Access eBook! Includes chapters on Khitan and Tangut epigraphy.

Uncatalogued Arabic manuscript from West Africa — a fragmented. Loose leaves, varying paper sizes. Topics include mathematics, astrology, talismans, magic, divination, and treatises. I am looking for assistance with describing this manuscript, if interested, please DM me. Thanks

This is how I speak Arabic

Mūsa receives the Torah from the angel Jibril

I was in the foothills of the Himalayas with Xi Jinping

Dutch in six weeks but you never learned Yiddish?

Selling all of my Heidegger books as the prophecy foretold

#UnJourUnePhoto #Photojune #Photography 1er juin : j'observe

"I want to live in holiness ... I find it a desecration to speak at all about the things that are important, as men speak today under the name of Wissenschaft" (Susan Taubes)

half-veil and half-star

Apparently the communist intellectual Najati Sidqi was born 100 years ago exactly today. I wrote about him and his wife, the rabblerouser Lutka Lorberbaum, a Polish Jew who studied Arabic to preach communism in the Palestinian countryside. ayinpress.org/lutka-and-na...

a summer spent studying Arabic by day and going to Brooklyn Cyclones games by night

"Beauty appears in Kafka's world only in the most obscure places—among the accused persons, for example."

Starting a vicious rumor that Leo XIV earned his MDiv at UChicago

كل شئ هالك الا وجهه

“Hebrew is pregnant with catastrophes” (Scholem)

Exile: “the ruined Temple is spread throughout the entire world, and the people of Israel are the altar of the sacrifices” (Gordin)

Maundy Thursday of Holy Week plays a special role in the Syriac churches. It commemorates Christ's washing of the feet in a solemn liturgy. Before the Last Supper, Jesus washed his disciples' feet to demonstrate his humility, devotion, and love (John 13:1-17).

Bloom got it wrong—there is an "American religion," but it's only represented by Thoreau, Dickinson, and Marilynne Robinson

Baking and distributing the matzot in early 14th century Spain #Passover BL Or 2737; the 'Hispano-Moresque Haggadah'; 1275 CE-1324 CE; Spain (Castile) ff.88r, 89v

thinking about גֵּר in the sense of a "stranger" rather than "Jewish convert," from the root ג־ו־ר = "to be a foreigner in a place." so in this sense "to become a Jew" in the reflexive (נִתְגַּיֵּר) might be read "to turn oneself into a foreigner"

Boyarin describing how he left Israel for Yale, because in 1983 Yale "was the Jerusalem of literary theory"

Angels from the Heidelberg Coptic Magical Papyri Project. Michael accompanied by his two Powers, intended to be copied onto an amulet. P. Heid. Inv. Kopt. 686. (KYP M166), 10th century #Medieval #Manuscripts #Angels #Papyrus #Coptic @anestudieswue.bsky.social @dfg.de