Incunabula

The most monstrous dictator in Europe since Hitler, not just appeased, but fêted, honored, by President Trump, who is seemingly intent on giving Putin absolutely everything he wants, including Ukrainian land his barbaric forces have not yet even conquered. A shameful day.

Andrew had a heart of the most immense kindness and generosity and an intellect that was, in the true sense of the word, awe-inspiring. I was very privileged to know him.

May his dear soul rest in peace.
Andrew C. West, 1960-2025.

I've just heard the terrible news that my friend - and friend of many here - Andrew West, @babelstone.co.uk, the incomparably brilliant Sinologist and Tangutologist passed away suddenly but peacefully on 10th July. 1/2

The official Harvard 2025 Yearbook:
“October 2023: War Breaks Out in Gaza.”

"Never again"

Why are 'anti-racists' silent about Arbel Yehud's terrible ordeal? Watching Arbel Yehud being freed in Gaza today, I thought to myself: this is what it must have been like at Salem

"This was not just a handover of an Israeli captive. It was a ritualistic humiliation. A Jew was hauled to a public square packed with men who hate her kind. She was made into a spectacle for the sport of radical Islamists. It was an outrage from another century."
www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-...

The so-called virtue of the West has blinded it to reality of Islamist cruelty Even the suffering of Israeli hostages can’t wake progressives from their fantasyland morality

"The West’s progressive dogma has deprived it of a theory of mind for savagery."
telegraph.co.uk/gift/fa907a1...

ברוך אתה אדוני, אלוהינו מלך העולם, מתיר אסורים

13 Jan. 1898 - Emile Zola addresses the President of France and accuses his government of antisemitism and the unlawful jailing of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Army officer sentenced to life imprisonment for espionage. Zola points out a litany of judicial errors and an utter lack of serious evidence.

That's a fair point - yes, I do pay, so I don't see ads on X at all.

Each to his own, but to me the vibe at Bluesky is humorless, insufferably smug and dull, dull, dull. I've no intention of ever posting new content here, I vastly prefer the rough and tumble of X. This is, and will remain, just a placeholder/backup account.

JEWISH PRINTING IN HEBREW, IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL IN 1578.

This is Rabbi Samuel Aripul's "Sar Shalom", printed in 1578 by Abraham & Eliezer Askkenazi at Safed (צְפַת Tsfat), the highest city in the Galilee, in what is today northern Israel.

Jews were printing books in Israel nearly 5 centuries ago.

In 1553, the population of Safed consisted of 1121 Muslim households, and 716 Jewish households, which rose to 945 households in 1567. There were more than 30 synagogues and 7000 Jews in Safed in 1576 when Murad III issued an edict for the forced deportation of 1000 Jewish families to Cyprus.

Jews have been a settled, permanent, continuous presence in the Holy Land for over three millennia, and have only ever left in numbers when exiled or forced out.

This is the beginning of the oldest Arabic version of Christ's Letter Sent from Heaven. This 10th century ms. (Munich BSB Cod. arab. 1067) is one of the oldest witnesses of this apocryphon in existence. Digital images are available online here: www.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/view/bsb0....

This collection has been formed quite regardless of expense - some of these tchotchkes cost literally fives of euros.

The vowels in this manuscript seem to be written in at a later date, and use a distinctly Polish Yiddish pronunciation. Many words are voweled in a Yiddish distortion of the Hebrew word, such as the word Ashpeh - in modern Hebrew it would be pronounced Ashpah, etc. 7/

There is debate as to when the pogroms associated with the Khmelnytsky Uprisings ended. The pogroms started in 1648, some historians put their end at 1654, but the pogrom described in this manuscript indicates otherwise. The general consensus today puts the end of these pogroms at 1657. 6/

"Fathers and children together were slaughtered next to each other. They slaughtered them and shed their blood, like the blood of rams and oxen.... The pillar of our world, Rabbi Judah, who had been a leader in the region for many years – they severed his head with an axe." 5/

"Rabbi Israel who was from the tribe of the Leviites, the enemies placed fire and sulphur on the heart, and his soul exited as he said the verse Shema Yisrael."
"...Rabbi Mordechai, who wrote the Holy Sefer Torah on parchments, and from them the enemies made sandals". 4/

Written in the form of a lamentation, it describes the pogrom starting on the 2nd day of Pesach in 1655 throughout the cities of Poland. "Rabbi Yitzchak the head of the Beth Din, who was an expert in the Torah, they injured his head, ripped his beard & threw him from the windows into the trash." 3/

The manuscript is undated, but the text has the character of a first-hand account, clearly written by someone who witnessed the pogrom himself, and likely dates from before 1700, thus predating the book itself by more than a century. The Hebrew vowelization was apparently added at a later period. 2/

A machzor (prayerbook), printed in Sulzbach in 1794, with a contemporary Hebrew manuscript account bound in of the Jews murdered in a Polish pogrom on the 2nd day of Pesach 1655, together with an additional later Yiddish translation written in pencil. 1/

No, I meant Jews, adherents of Judaism. When this developed in identifiable form is disputed, many academic historians say from the 8th or 9th century BCE, the Jewish view is it's much earlier than that. Samaritanism was also, separately, present but primarily confined to Samaria in central Israel.

This manuscript was formerly in the library of perhaps the greatest of all Jewish bibliophiles, David Solomon Sassoon. 6/

The rite of Avignon liturgy was first printed between 1763 and 1767; this however, did not include a volume for the three Pilgrimage Festivals, and even when this eventually appeared in Aix in 1855, it did not reproduce all of the traditional Avignonese piyyutim found in this manuscript. 5/

This manuscript machzor is especially noteworthy for its traditional Avignonese piyyutim (some known only from this copy), as well as several unusual prayer formulas - including special prayers for the well-being of the Pope, something not often found in a Jewish prayerbook! 4/

Because of their extreme isolation from the rest of the Jewish world (and even, within the Comtat Venaissin, from each other), all four communities developed their own unique customs and minhag (liturgical rite).

Many of these were never printed, and survive only in manuscript form, as here. 3/

After their expulsion from France in the 14th-century, a handful of Jews remained in the independent Provençal Papal territory known as the Comtat Venaissin.

Avignon was one of four Jewish communities tolerated by the Holy See: the other 3 were Carpentras, Cavaillon, & L'isle-sur-la-Sorgue. 2/

The 7 days of Sukkot start tomorrow. Sukkot is one of the three Jewish festivals on which the ancient Israelites were commanded to make a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem.

This beautiful machzor (prayerbook) for Sukkot according to the rite of Avignon, was written by David Tsoref in 1721. 1/