Wolter et al., The Quest for the Real Jesus

NEW BOOK FROM BRILL:

The Quest for the Real Jesus
Radboud Prestige Lectures by Prof. Dr. Michael Wolter

Edited by Jan van der Watt, Radboud University Nijmegen

The Radboud Prestige Lectures in New Testament 2010 were presented by Prof. Michael Wolter (University of Bonn). His prestige lecture was entitled: ‘Which is the real Jesus?’. In this lecture he challenged many of the current views within the historical Jesus research by critically evaluating the approaches in various categories. Afterwards this lecture was presented to a variety of scholars from different disciplines who approach the problem from their particular perspectives, thus bringing a rich texture of insights, apart from engaging critically with Wolter’s views. Thus one can appreciate the role the quest for the historical Jesus plays within a wider framework. This resulted in interesting articles that not only deal with historical, but also with philosophical and hermeneutical issues.

Fort William

I'M OFF TO THE HIGHLANDS to spend a few days in Fort William and its environs. I don't plan to do much blogging, but I have pre-posted things for the days that I am away, so do keep coming back as usual. Have a good week!

Bons et al. (eds.), The Reception of Septuagint Words in Jewish-Hellenistic and Christian Literature

NEW BOOK FROM MOHR SIEBECK:

The Reception of Septuagint Words in Jewish-Hellenistic and Christian Literature

Ed. by Eberhard Bons, Ralph Brucker and Jan Joosten

The projected Historical and Theological Lexicon of the Septuagint will offer historical studies of Septuagint words, retracing their usage from early Greek authors, over koine Greek and the Septuagint translation itself, into Jewish-Hellenistic and early Christian literature. The latter two of these phases were the object of a workshop held in Bühl (Germany) on January 21 and 22, 2011. The reception of the Septuagint in Greek-speaking Judaism and Christianity raises many questions touching the lexicon, such as: How do Jewish or Christian authors writing in Greek handle the difference existing for some words between the "biblical" usage created in the Septuagint and the usual meaning in Greek? To what extent is it possible to affirm that New Testament authors borrowed their religious terminology from the Septuagint? Which words of the Septuagint continue in later writings with their specific meaning, and which ones go out of use? Is it possible to observe further semantic developments in the use of "biblical" words by Jewish or Christian authors writing in Greek?
These and similar questions are of concern not only to the narrow fields of lexical semantics and philology. More often than not, they have important historical and theological implications. With help from some of the best specialists of Jewish-Hellenistic and early Christian texts, an effort will be made in this book to develop an adequate approach to the problems outlined. Papers will combine the analysis of selected words and word groups with considerations of method.

Follow the link for TOC and ordering information.

ISBL 2014

THIS YEAR'S INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE MEETING began yesterday in Vienna. I have other plans this week, but best wishes to all those attending. If Facebook is any indication, they are having a good time.

Reif and the Cairo Geniza

PROFESSOR STEFAN REIF: 'Indiana Jones' of the Cairo Genizah. As many as 200,000 Jewish manuscripts, some more than 1,000 years old, comprise the most important Jewish treasure of the century. Prof. Stefan Reif of the University of Cambridge, who exposed Cairo Genizah and its discoveries to the world, tells Ynet about the revolution it created in the perception of Judaism. (Ynet News, Tali Farkash). This is a long article that covers a lot of ground. Here are a couple of excerpts, but read it all.

Until his retirement, Prof. Reif was responsible for the huge archive, which is considered one of the most important archives in the world and includes as many as 200,000 rare Jewish manuscripts, some of them more than 1,000 years old.

Reif, who is considered one of the leading researchers in his field, has authored countless studies and many books. One of them, "Judaism and Hebrew Prayer," was also translated into Hebrew.

"It wasn't negligence," he says diplomatically about the seven decades in which the Cairo Genizah was abandoned. "They started to document and preserve, but a small part of it.

"When I was appointed to head the department, I didn't have any staff, budget, research or categorization means. I remember telling the university management, 'We need an organized research plan,' and they said, 'That's exactly what we brought you here for."

Prof. Reif dedicated 40 years of his life to the collection which is seen, and rightfully so, as his life's work. So far, researchers have managed to document and preserve 70% to 80% of the writings, but even today it's still possible that there are additional discoveries waiting to be made – ancient writings which the team of researchers has yet to study and categorize.

Talking to Ynet, Prof. Reif reveals the decision to start a new research department at the University of Haifa under his leadership, which will allow Israeli students to study more about the far-reaching implications of the Cairo Genizah findings, and explains why that collection of writings is responsible for the revolution in the way we perceive Judaism today.

[...]

"There is not a single field in which the genizah has not created a revolution. The Bible and the Hebrew, for example, today we are familiar with a certain kind of punctuation in Hebrew. In the past there were other types of punctuations which disappeared, and through the letters they are suddenly revealed again. Today we have the possibility of restoring them through the letters kept in the genizah.

"Another example, which is as important, is the Jerusalem Talmud. Usually when people talk about the Talmud, they mean the Babylonian Talmud. The Jerusalem Talmud is perceived as difficult and incomprehensible, and people didn't know how to interpret it. Today we have complete writings about the Jerusalem Talmud which were written in the same periods, and we can understand a lot from them about what used to be inaccessible.

"These are just two direct implications on the two most important books in the Jewish world, but of course it doesn't end there. ..."

Congratulations to Professor Reif on the honorary degree and the new post at Haifa University. An SBL Forum article by him on the Geniza is noted here.

My own work on the Hekhalot literature and the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (Aramaic Levi) has been much enriched by Cairo Geniza manuscripts. And over the years I have put up many, many PaleoJudaica posts on the Cairo Geniza. I don't have time to sort through them all, but you can find lots of them here, here, here, here, and here, and follow the links.

As I said in that last post, the Cairo Geniza is the philologist's gift that keeps on giving.

Khazars, Samaritans, Jews, and genetics

A COUPLE OF RECENT LINES OF RESEARCH have a bearing on the supposed relationship between Jews and the Khazars (and the Samaritans come in too). First, in The Forward there is an article on historical research by Prof. Shaul Stampfer of the Hebrew University: Why Ashkenazi Jews Are Not Descended From Khazars — and What It Means. Mass Conversion Claim Cast Doubt on Mideast Origins (Ofer Aderet). Excerpt:

Stampfer, an expert in Jewish history, analyzed material from various fields, but found no reliable source for the claim that the Khazars – a multiethnic kingdom that included Iranians, Turks, Slavs and Circassians – converted to Judaism. “There never was a conversion by the Khazar king or the Khazar elite,” he said. “The conversion of the Khazars is a myth with no factual basis.”

As a historian, he said he was surprised to discover how hard it is “to prove that something didn’t happen. Until now, most of my research has been aimed at discovering or clarifying what did happen in the past … It’s a much more difficult challenge to prove that something didn’t happen than to prove it did.”

That’s because the proof is based primarily on the absence of evidence rather than its presence – like the fact that an event as unprecedented as an entire kingdom’s conversion to Judaism merited no mention in contemporaneous sources.

“The silence of so many sources about the Khazars’ Judaism is very suspicious,” Stampfer said. “The Byzantines, the geonim [Jewish religious leaders of the sixth to eleventh centuries], the sages of Egypt – none of them have a word about the Jewish Khazars.”

The claim that Ashkenazi Jews descend from converted Khazars received wide attention after the publication of Shlomo Sands's controversial book The Invention of the Jewish People in 2008, which argued for this conclusion. For reviews etc. see here and follow the links.

Second, Prof. Steven Weitzman e-mails to alert PaleoJudaica to some relevant biological research:

May I call your attention to the following just published special volume of the journal Human Biology, which contains some very new genetics research of potential interest to your audience (including research bearing on the Samaritans, on the Khazar theory of Jewish origins, and other pertinent topics).

http://wsupress.wayne.edu/news-events/news/detail/announcing-special-issue-human-biology

The scientists involved, including colleagues at Stanford, are considered leading population geneticists and their publication reflects research only possible in the last 5-10 years (though there may be more they can learn from the relevant historiography). The volume represents an attempt to bridge between Jewish Studies and genetics, and the experience has taught me that the two fields still have much to learn from the other.

Here's the TOC of the issue:

Table of Contents

Introduction: From Generation to Generation: The Genetics of Jewish Populations

Noah A. Rosenberg and Steven P. Weitzman

Articles

Genetics and the History of the Samaritans: Y-Chromosomal Microsatellites and Genetic Affinity between Samaritans and Cohanim

Peter J. Oefner, Georg Hölzl, Peidong Shen, Isaac Shpirer, Dov Gefel, Tal Lavi, Eilon Woolf, Jona- than Cohen, Cengiz Cinnioglu, Peter A. Underhill, Noah A. Rosenberg, Jochen Hochrein, Julie M. Granka, Jossi Hillel, and Marcus W. Feldman

No Evidence from Genome-wide Data of a Khazar Origin for the Ashkenazi Jews

Doron M. Behar, Mait Metspalu, Yael Baran, Naama M. Kopelman, Bayazit Yunusbayev, Ariella Gladstein, Shay Tzur, Hovhannes Sahakyan, Ardeshir Bahmanimehr, Levon Yepiskoposyan, Kris- tiina Tambets, Elza K. Khusnutdinova, Alena Kushniarevich, Oleg Balanovsky, Elena Balanovsky, Lejla Kovacevic, Damir Marjanovic, Evelin Mihailov, Anastasia Kouvatsi, Costas Triantaphyllidis, Roy J. King, Ornella Semino, Antonio Torroni, Michael F. Hammer, Ene Metspalu, Karl Skorecki, Saharon Rosset, Eran Halperin, Richard Villems, and Noah A. Rosenberg

Commentary

Jewish Genetic Origins in the Context of Past Historical and Anthropological Inquiries

John M. Efron

Who Are the Jews? New Formulations of an Age-Old Question

Susan Martha Kahn

Letter to the Editor

Genetics and the Archaeology of Ancient Israel

Aaron J. Brody and Roy J. King

Some of Professor Weitzman's other work has also been mentioned in posts here and here.

Reviews of the Enoch Seminar latest

RECENT REVIEWS AT REVIEWS OF THE ENOCH SEMINAR:

Ryan Korstange reviews Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ

Amy-Jill Levine reviews Isaac W. Oliver, Torah Praxis after 70 CE: Reading Matthew and Luke-Acts as Jewish Texts

Eric R. Montgomery reviews Devorah Dimant, The Dead Sea Scrolls in Scholarly Perspective: A History of Research

Gavin McDowell reviews Finn Damgaard, Recasting Moses: The Memory of Moses in Biographical and Autobiographical Narratives in Ancient Judaism and 4th-Century Christianity

Hurtado on Paul Seminar

CONFERENCE REPORT: Larry Hurtado reports on the recent Nangeroni Enoch Seminar in Rome on “Paul as a Second-Temple Jew” and summarizes his own paper. Two posts so far: Paul: The Second-Temple Jewish Apostle to the Gentiles and Paul and Gentile Circumcision.

Bible Odyssey

NOW UP AND RUNNING: Bible Odyssey.

New mosaic at Huqoq

BIBLE PLACES BLOG: New Mosaic Discovered in Huqoq Synagogue.

Background on the first Samson mosaic excavated at Huqoq, plus many other ancient mosaics in Israel (etc.), is here and links. Somehow I had missed the other Samson mosaic found there last summer, mentioned in the UNC press release that Todd Bolen quotes in the first link above.

An Atheist’s Case for Talmud

THE FORWARD: An Atheist’s Case for Talmud. Sating a New Hunger With an Ancient Book. Leah Vincent, a formerly ultra-Orthodox woman, rediscovers Talmud.

July 4th

HAPPY AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE DAY to all those celebrating!

The Talmud, Judaism, and asceticism

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Better To Suffer or Better To Live? Eating—and Not Eating—as a Meritorious Jewish Act. Talmudic rabbis debate Jewish solidarity in the face of misfortune, a communal imperative that still holds today.. Two excerpts:

Despite all these specifications, however, the Talmud is by no means enthusiastic about fasting for its own sake. Indeed, the very strictness of the rules for declaring communal fasts is meant to control the ascetic impulse, not encourage it. Here as always, Judaism stands in sharp contrast to Christianity in its attitude toward asceticism: There is no Jewish imperative to scourge the body in order to elevate the soul. Celibacy has never been a Jewish virtue—all Jews are bound by the commandment to be fruitful and multiply—and while the holiest Christians are those who withdraw from the world, the holiest Jews, the Torah sages, were businessmen and family men. The Judaism we have come to know in the Talmud is emphatically a religion for living in the world, not for fleeing or disparaging the world.

I would nuance the part about celibacy never having been a Jewish virtue. The Essenes, according to Philo and Josephus, as well as the Egyptian Therapeutae according to Philo, seemed to feel differently. But they are perhaps the exceptions that prove the rule.

Elazar makes this point with a striking and powerful image: “A person should always consider himself as though a sacred object is immersed in his bowels.” There is something sacred literally inside of us; our bodies are not just envelopes for our souls, but a kind of holy cargo that we have to treat with decency and kindness. Accordingly, Elazar holds that if you are able to fast without causing yourself bodily harm, you are “sacred”; but if a fast would damage your body, you would be a “sinner” to undertake it.

That made me think of the Buddhist teaching in The Questions of King Milinda that ascetics should care for the body in the same way that one cares for a wound. Compare and contrast.

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.

About PaleoJudaica

ORIGINALLY AND FOR MANY YEARS I included an "About" page in the sidebar to introduce readers to me and to this blog. A few years ago when I had to update the Template (long story, which I'm not sure I even remember myself) the About page was automatically purged from the sidebar and later it evaporated entirely. I have always meant to put it up again, but have only just now gotten around to it. Look at the sidebar to the right where it says "Pages" in dark type. The first one, which just takes you to the front page, is "Home." The one below it, "About PaleoJudaica," will lead you to the blog's About page, newly revised, rethought, and updated. When you get a chance, go and have a look.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe's 20th yahrzeit

ANNIVERSARY: The Lubavitcher Rebbe Died 20 Years Ago Today. Who Was He? Two new biographies attempt to describe the Chabad leader, but can we ever fathom his ultimate aloneness? (Susan Handelman, Tablet Magazine)

PaleoJudaica has posted on many articles about the Lubavitcher Rebbe (start here and follow the links back to 2003) and noted his tenth yahrzeit here. My main interest has been phenomenological: here is a twenty-first century post-mortem Messiah, complete with rumors of an empty casket and resurrection appearances, as well as claims of occultation and apotheosis. This article touches on these issues, but it is mainly a personal account of the writer's interactions with the Rebbe and reflections on his life, while including in passing reviews of two new books about him. On the issue of messianism she writes:

The messianic idea indeed is one of the great gifts the Jews have given the world: an optimistic view of history; of the world, despite all its bloodshed and darkness, still moving forward toward a goal; of the human task as repair of the world in partnership with God. As Rabbi Léon Ashkenazi, a major postwar French Jewish thinker, put it: “Jewish history is dramatic, but not tragic.” But like all powerful ideas, messianism has also been twisted and distorted in dangerous ways.

The Rebbe’s entire life, I think, was a cry to God to bring the Redemption. For him, it had already been too long; there had been too much pain. As he got older and felt his own personal end coming, he further intensified that call, and a messianic controversy swirled around him. Some of his followers tried to proclaim him the Messiah, which pained him personally, and which he tried to stop time after time. A few months before his stroke, a Chabad rabbi sent him a letter referring to him as “King Messiah.” The Rebbe’s secretary witnessed him looking at the letter, throwing it down in frustration and writing on it, “Tell him that when the Messiah comes, I will give him the letter.” After his stroke, and the diminution of his physical and cognitive abilities, he was not able to control those extremists anymore.

Telushkin and Steinsaltz [the writers of the two abovementioned books] both spend considerable time discussing the controversy, explaining traditional Jewish notions of the Messiah, the Rebbe’s pronouncements, and how they were interpreted and misinterpreted. The key is the text the Rebbe himself often cited to define the Jewish Messiah, Maimonides’ authoritative Code of Jewish Law at the end of his “Laws of Kings.” Maimonides defines “possible candidates” in every generation. Someone from the lineage of the House of David, of great piety, Torah scholarship and observance, who prevails on all Israel to follow the paths of Torah and battles their oppressors can be “presumed” to be the Messiah [chezkat moshiach]. Nothing supernatural is needed. But only if such a candidate succeeds, goes on to rebuild the Temple on its ancient site, and the Exiles are gathered in, can he be confirmed as beyond all doubt the Messiah [moshiach vaddai]. Any “presumed Messiah” can fail or die and then is simply considered, in Maimonides’ words, like all the “wholehearted and worthy kings of the House of David who died”—but he is not the Messiah.

In this context, I, like Steinsaltz and Telushkin, and many others in the Chabad and non-Chabad world, considered the Rebbe as good a “candidate” as any for our generation. But he died, the Exile continues, the world still suffers. He was not the Messiah.

The Aleppo Codex, the Ezekiel Plates, and The Treatise of the Vessels

MATTI FRIEDMAN: The Continuing Mysteries of the Aleppo Codex. Developments in the saga of the missing perfect copy of the Hebrew Bible, whose future is still unknown (Tablet Magazine).

I am not sure I expected the story of the long-forgotten Aleppo Codex, the perfect copy of the Hebrew Bible, to occupy me for very long after the publication of my book on the subject in 2012. I thought I would soon be on to other things, which is the way journalism tends to work. But, as sometimes happens, the story has taken on a life of its own: a cover-up energized by the fallout from my book; the rejuvenated activities of a small group of codex loyalists ranging in age from 36 (me) to 82 (former Mossad case officer Rafi Sutton); and a recent edict issued against me by a prominent rabbi in New York. In short, the story of the Aleppo Codex is alive today as it has not been in many decades, and I believe an update on developments over the past two years is warranted for those who find themselves fascinated by the strange and ongoing saga of one of the most important manuscripts on earth.

[...]

I kept track of reviews etc. of Friedman's book and you can find the posts starting here and follow the links. The continuation of the story remains very interesting and this in particular caught my eye and made me think of another matter:

The second mystery, that of the missing pages, was long famous among a small number of people—Bible professors, Aleppo exiles, and a few others. The official version of the story, propagated by the academics in Israel who control the manuscript, claimed the pages vanished in Aleppo around the time of the 1947 riot. But we know now that the manuscript was seen whole as late as 1952, five years later. The first description of any significant damage to the codex dates, strikingly, only to 1958—after the manuscript reached the Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem.

At around the same time, my investigation found, dozens of valuable books and manuscripts vanished from the library of the same institute. When I approached former officials at the institute with evidence of the other missing books, several went on record saying the man responsible for their disappearance was the institute’s director at the time, Meir Benayahu, a scholar who throughout a long and illustrious career studied, collected, bought, and sold rare Hebrew books. He left his post amid a legal battle over control of the institute in 1970.

Benayahu, who died in 2009, came from a powerful political family with roots in Iraq; he was the son of a Sephardic chief rabbi, Yitzhak Nissim, and brother of a senior Likud cabinet minister, Moshe Nissim. (As was common in those years, Benayahu adopted a more modern and Israeli-sounding last name.) This scandal has long been known in Israel’s small and insular academic world but was never made public. Legal proceedings were avoided at the time thanks to the direct intervention of Israel’s president, Zalman Shazar. Police were never summoned, no charges were filed, and no books were returned. Benayahu’s family denies any wrongdoing and says the accusations against him are a smear campaign aimed at covering up thefts by other people; they have asked, rightly, why no one went to the police at the time. Today Benayahu’s family owns a collection of Hebrew texts that is one of the world’s largest in private hands.

Whatever precisely happened at the Ben-Zvi Institute, the long-buried affair of the institute’s vanished books—whether it is connected or not to the disappearance of the codex pages—is arguably the worst corruption scandal in the history of the Israeli academy. Among the figures who have gone on record saying Benayahu was responsible for the institute’s missing books are Zvi Zameret, the institute’s longtime administrative director and subsequently one of the top officials in Israel’s Education Ministry; Joseph Hacker, professor emeritus at Hebrew University and a former deputy director of the institute; and the late Yom-Tov Assis, the professor who headed the Ben-Zvi Institute at the time of my own investigation.

Are the missing codex pages linked to the broader disappearance of books from the Ben-Zvi Institute? The scholars of the Ben-Zvi Institute have resisted any investigation while failing to produce any evidence to dispel the suspicion.

The so-called Ezekiel Plates, a series of many stone tablets with most of the text of Ezekiel engraved on them, are also held in the Ben-Zvi Institute. I noted and discussed a Jerusalem Post article on them three years ago in my post Ezekiel plates—and a legend of the Temple treasures. The article did not seem to realize that the set had originally included two more tablets on which was inscribed the concluding verse and a half of Ezekiel and then a version of The Treatise of the Vessels, a legendary account in Hebrew of the hiding of the Ark of the Covenant and other Temple treasures just before the Babylonian destruction of the Temple. I published the first complete English translation of this work in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures last year, and the text got some attention in the media and even led the Daily Mail to call me "a modern-day Indiana Jones."

Be that as it may, the interesting thing in this context is that the stone plates containing The Treatise of the Vessels are no longer with the Ezekiel Plates. I learned this in e-mail correspondence in February of 2008 with Michael Glatzer, the Academic Secretary of the Institute, who kindly checked the Ezekiel Plates housed there. The Jerusalem Post article linked to above gives the following background on the Ezekiel Plates:

In this case, the tiles were supposedly found over 100 years ago when visitors to the traditional tomb of Ezekiel in the small Iraqi town of Kfar al-Kafil, located about 50 miles south of Baghdad, noticed a stone tile had fallen off the inside of the burial chamber. Oddly, its back side contained an ancient lettering which had been deliberately hidden, facing the wall. Other tiles were removed and similar inscriptions were found on their back sides as well.

The entire set of Ezekiel plates were then taken to Lebanon, where decades later a Christian Arab widow, on the advice of her priest, wanted to place them in Jewish hands before she moved to France. She sold them for a mere two pounds sterling to businessman David Hacohen in 1947.

He smuggled the plates into Israel in 1953, and they were eventually acquired by Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Israel’s second president and a noted historian, who considered them a valuable national treasure.

After Ben-Zvi’s death, the Ezekiel plates became the property of the Institute in Jerusalem set up in his honor, which had them in storage until Zwebner convinced his wife’s parents, Max and Lombi Landau, to sponsor their public display.

The Ezekiel Plates were acquired by Ben-Zvi sometime after 1953 and became the property of the Institute after his death in 1963. The article does not say where they were housed during those ten years. At some undetermined point the plates containing The Treatise of the Vessels were separated from the Ezekiel Plates and vanished. As far as I could determine the missing plates were last seen by Jean Starcky, who photographed one of them in Beirut "a good number of years" before J. T. Milik published the photo in 1959. Now Friedman reports that sometime between 1952 and 1958 a large chunk of the Aleppo Codex also vanished, and around the same time "dozens of valuable books and manuscripts" also disappeared from the Institute. The timing is striking. Is the stone version of The Treatise of the Vessels one of these manuscripts? I don't know and I certainly am not making any assumptions or accusations. The plates could have been separated and lost before they came to the Ben-Zvi Institute. But still, the possibility of a connection between the missing stone plates and the other missing manuscripts is intriguing and potentially worth following up.

Another notable point is that journalist Owen Jarus has called into question the connection of the Ezekiel Plates with the Tomb of Ezekiel in Iraq and has indicated he has evidence that they were produced about a century ago in Syria.

It seems that we have not yet exhausted the mysteries surrounding the Aleppo Codex, the Ezekiel Plates, and The Treatise of the Vessels.

Schäfer to head Jewish Museum Berlin

CONGRATULATIONS TO PETER SCHÄFER:

Change at the Head of the Jewish Museum Berlin

As of 1 September 2014, Prof. Dr. Peter Schäfer will take over as new director of the Jewish Museum Berlin. The Museum's Board of Trustees today agreed unanimously to Schäfer's appointment. At the request of Federal Government Commissioner for Federal Culture Commissioner and the Media Monika Grütters and Peter Schäfer, Prof. Dr. Michael Blumenthal, the longstanding founding director of the Jewish Museum Berlin, will serve in an advisory capacity for a transitional period.

Federal Commissioner Monika Grütters: "I'm very happy that it was possible to gain Professor Schäfer, an internationally active and acclaimed expert of Judaism, as the museum's new director. I am confident in his commitment to continue the work of Professor Blumenthal and build upon the museum's success to date while making his own mark."

Commissioner Grütters emphasized further: "The unprecedented success of the Jewish Museum Berlin is a direct result of Professor Blumenthal's passion and energy. We are greatly indebted to him for his years of commitment – all the more so in light of his biography!"

During the meeting of the Board of Trustees, W. Michael Blumenthal explained that he had been asking himself for some time when would be the right moment to pass the baton to a successor. When it became clear that Peter Schäfer, following his retirement from academic life, would be available, he knew he had his answer. "I realized immediately that we had to get this outstanding and highly distinguished academic on board. And this was reaffirmed by Culture Commissioner Grütters and our friends in politics, business and society at large," explained Blumenthal. "He will be able to give the museum key impulses like no one else I know."

[...]

HT Lawrence E. Frizzell.

More recent news about Professor Schäfer is here and links.

Warburg Library update

THE TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION: Warburg Institute: library saved from Nazis awaits its fate (Jack Grove). The fate of the library is still up in the air:

Four years after Warburg’s death, the collection of about 80,000 books, many rare Renaissance volumes, was moved to London as Nazism took hold in 1930s Germany. However, the University of London is now seeking to challenge the status of the deed of trust it signed in 1944 when accepting the collection.

That document promised to maintain and preserve the collection “in perpetuity” as “an independent unit” – a pledge that now appears onerous as the Warburg runs a reported £500,000 annual deficit.

Representatives for both the university and the Warburg Institute were due to appear in a court in London’s Rolls Building this week after efforts to negotiate a compromise over the past five years have failed.

Last week I noted an article about this in the New Yorker which turned out to be several years old. But this Times Higher article was published this month and indicates that the case has yet to be resolved. There is also a petition to Save the Warburg Institute!, brought to my attention by Timothy Michael Law on Facebook.

The DSS and the text of the Bible

BIBLE HISTORY DAILY: The “Original” Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Can the scrolls help expose the original Bible language within the Masoretic Text and Septuagint?

Noah Wiener summarizes an article by Emanuel Tov in the current issue of BAR. The full text of the latter article is behind the subscription wall.

Schiffman on schisms

LAWRENCE H. SCHIFFMAN: Schisms in Jewish History. In two parts: The Limits of Tolerance: Halakhah and History and The Samaritan Schism.