Transmission
The Pale of Settlement
On 23 December 1791 the Empress Catherine the Great signed a decree that fixed the residence of the Jews of the Russian Empire inside a line drawn across the western territories of…
Archive
synagogue
Places
A Crown of Paper
Two objects kept in the Great Synagogue of Aleppo bore the same name, and neither of them resembled the other. One was a worked mass of silver, made to be fitted over…
Scripture
The Scrolls of Augsburg
Inside the synagogue on Halderstrasse in Augsburg, in the small hours of 10 November 1938, the caretaker was made to unlock his own front door. Twenty or thirty men pushed past him,…
Scripture
Targum Onkelos and the Birth of Aramaic Scripture
Few documents of the late Second Temple and early Tannaitic periods have been more continuously used than the Aramaic translation of the Pentateuch that Jewish tradition calls Targum Onkelos. It is the…
Scripture
Targum Onkelos And The Aramaic Pentateuch Tradition
Long before the Hebrew text received its Tiberian pointing, and before the Masoretes fixed its consonants in the canonical line we now read, Jewish communities in the land of Israel and the…