Jewish history
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Made-up tales, possibly true stories, and why any of that matters. Finding out about women: “How it actually went down.” The BIAJS conference in July this year had gender as its theme, so I presented a paper on the supposed great scholar Beruria and the inevitably doomed (by my reckoning) attempts to fashion her as…
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“The English have for centuries been a mystery to the peoples of other countries, and failure to solve this mystery has led the stranger to use all sorts of epithets.” In June 1945 this sentence began the dictation passage in an exam paper for the Certificate in Proficiency in English. Around then my father, a…
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This is for all you bakers, anyone who eats bread or makes it, anyone wondering how to keep your sourdough going in difficult times. It’s not a serious problem of survival and safety like looking after humans or other animals but you might still be wondering what will happen to your sourdough starter after months…
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I heard that the blues musician Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in return for his guitar-playing genius, that Paganini was the devil’s violinist and the devil himself is a fiddle player. That was reported as fact to a folklore researcher and quoted in his article The Devil and the…
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Amulets are still everywhere. You might have noticed them in cabs dangling from rear mirrors, behind the serving counter in a takeaway, and worn as necklaces or rings. They go back thousands of years. I didn’t know what an amulet was until I read Edith Nesbit’s The story of the amulet, and even then I…
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