Thursday, February 28, 2008

It's really been a while since I wrote anything. The Bar-Asher festschrift arrived at the library, all three weighty volumes of it, and I read another posthumous article by Yisrael Ta-Shma. The article was a short one, with a few notes on the texts published by Nicholas de Lange, Greek-Jewish Texts from the Cairo Genizah. The notes are not extremely important, but they are a reminder of what an amazing eye Ta-Shma had for detail, an ability to reconstruct an obscure custom from a source that would seem unremarkable to anyone else.

Prof. Jordan Penkower's article in the current Shnaton le-heker ha-Mikra utilizes another source (the famous Leipzig Bible) to demonstrate the textual integrity of the Ashkenazic biblical tradition.

A new issue of Tarbiz has been published. I haven't seen it yet, or its TOC, but it contains an article by Menahem Kahana, and another by Simcha Emanuel.

The past couple of weeks, I've been working on my research proposal for the PhD program in Israel that I hope will accept me soon. My topic allows me to both ask how I can possibly cover so much uncharted territory, and at the same time to despair at having anything original left to say, after so many scholars over the past 150 years have tracked their boots over the same ground.

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

why are writing on something that has written on and perhaps there is nothing new, when there are many things new to do in judaic studies

1:07 AM  
Blogger manuscriptboy said...

Please feel free to suggest topics that you consider more important than my (unspecified) topic.

7:33 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

i don't know what you want to do, where and how. but upon speaking to the late prof. ta-shma, he told me there are numerous balkan mansuscripts around, greek, romanot etc and he said whoever goes into that area will become an expert in virgin territory. since then i haven't seen anyone really going into it. just the same medieval topics, france, germany, italy, spain and a bit of provence.
so what do you want to do, where, with whom, period, area, etc.

9:33 PM  
Blogger manuscriptboy said...

Ah, Byzantium! That is indeed an important topic. I know someone who was going to write on it under Ta Shma.
Contact me by email if you want to discuss what I'm working on.

9:52 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

i'm relatively new at this, and can't find your email on the blog.
interesting comments on your latest blog. now how or why was the dear late professor so mistaken.
the original anonymous
ps 7 hour difference between the holy land and i think where you are and so i don't get to see these blogs so often.

11:09 PM  

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