This is the story of an adventurous journey into a magical, unknown and incomprehensible world where nature is alive and has a psyche, including trees. Do trees have a spirit? Does a tree have a soul? Scientists may question the notion that trees have a mind, soul or spirit, but there are cultures where trees have a soul and a mind of their own. The book describes the mind-blowing experience of entry into a world of spirits and trees, a world of animism – the field of anthropology that ascribes a psyche to all natural elements. Written in the form of travel log accompanied by illustrations, the book reveals the wisdom and sensitivities of villagers in northern Burma, who opened their home, their trees and their hearts to the author, allowing him to touch and understand their beliefs, and through them understand his own self.

Armenian Manuscripts of the David and Jemima Jeselsohn Collection is devoted to the five Armenian codices in the Jeselsohn collection in Zurich. Of great importance for Armenian studies and the history of art more generally, they represent various literary types, including biblical, hagiographic, homiletic, and liturgical texts. They also reflect an array of visual and artisanal traditions, connected to artistic centres in the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, Constantinople, and New Julfa, and span a period of over 300 years. A newly identified Sargis Picak manuscript is of exceptional importance for the study of medieval Armenian art, for its images, for Sargis’ colophons, and for a a hitherto unstudied ivory plaque of the Transfiguration. A Ritual of 1586 holds particular importance for scholars of the Armenian liturgy and its development in sixteenth-century Jerusalem. Also presented is a beautiful parchment leaf of the opening of the Gospel of John, studied and published previously by Michael and Nira Stone, and likely originating from a Bible produced in seventeenth-century New Julfa. Two Gospel Books complete this study: one from New Julfa, dated to 1695, and another likely produced in late seventeenth or early eighteenth-century Constantinople. This book was initiated and supported by David Jeselsohn, avid and longtime collector of archaeological artifacts, manuscripts, and Judaica. It was written jointly by Michael Stone and Christina Maranci. Maranci is an art historian and Stone is a specialist in Armenian philology, palaeography and codicology. Maranci bears primary responsibility for research on the miniatures – their art-historical analysis and iconography as well as their attribution, date, and context. Stone contributed the textual, codicological and palaeographical research, including translation of the colophons from the Classical Armenian (Grabar) into English, and catalogued the contents of all five manuscripts.

A jubilee volume in honor of Prof. Menahem Ben-Sasson. The book, which contains 22 articles written by Prof. Ben-Sasson's colleagues, students, friends, and family members is dedicated to phenomena of leadership in the Jewish world . The various articles examine conceptions, practices and ways of Jewish leadership from diverse perspectives and in varied times and places. They are based on variegated sources: historical and judicial documents, biblical exegeses, poetry, letters, Responsa, polemical and philosophical writings. The volume is a tribute to Prof. Ben Sasson's extensive academic and public activity.

To the Water , a monograph on the writer Yosef Haim Brenner, seeks to reimagine the conventional perspective on Brenner, shifting the focus from his role as a national prophet to that of a modernist writer. The chapters of the book collectively form a life story, not only of the writer himself but also of his artistic era, the era of early Hebrew modernism. This innovative literary language, forged through the wanderings of Brenner and his cohort of young, provincial writers in early 20th-century Europe, transcended mere "style". It constituted a profound way of thinking and experiencing the world, swiftly captivating its creators, bursting forth in their works with great originality, and, paradoxically, vanishing with the same swiftness with which it had arrived. The book strives to recontextualize Brenner's creative output, asserting that his style does not merely continue the tradition of European realism from the 19th century. Instead, it stands as a bold and uniquely Hebrew creation, distinct from anything that preceded it.

In this issue: Ohad Abudraham | A New Reading of a Mandaic Incantation Bowl in the Miami University Art Museum Erhard Blum | A “Neglected” Aramaic Dialect: The Literary Idiom of the Kingdom of Aram-Damascus Moshe Bar-Asher | Problems in the Description of the Morphology of Mishnaic Hebrew Haim Dihi | Some Linguistic Innovations in the Book of Ben Sira: The Contribution of MS F from the Cairo Geniza Shai Heijmans | Pretonic Reduction of Greek Loanwords in the Mishna and Its Significance And more...

The New Arabic-Hebrew Dictionary is a dictionary of the Arabic language across the ages, with focus on the language of the spoken and written media. The dictionary also reflects the rich literary history of the Arabic language, of more than 1,400 years, including the Qur'an, ancient poetry, proverbs, the Hadith and jurisprudential literature, Adab literature and historical literature. Terms and expressions from the sphere of Islamic theology and jurisprudence, which were considered archaic 50 or 60 years ago, have come back into use following the rise of fundamentalist Islam in the 1970s, and this new dictionary provides translations and explanations for these terms as well. With over 44,000 entries, this dictionary is today the most comprehensive, up-to-date and reliable dictionary of contemporary Arabic. User-friendly: full vocalization of all Arabic and Hebrew entries. About 6,000 examples from Arabic literature of all eras and from the press clarify the use of words. Over 4,000 grammatical and historical notes. The New Arabic-Hebrew Dictionary is intended for university students and scholars, school pupils and teachers and anyone interested in the Arabic language.

The spread of the Assyrian Empire over the entire Fertile Crescent in the second half of the 8th century BC introduced various forms of cooperation between the neighboring nomadic Arabs and the imperial authorities. The geographical conditions and resultant lifestyle of the Arabs facilitated a mutual dependence and delicate equilibrium between themselves and the Assyrian rulers, eager to capitalize on their unprecedented regional might. Henceforth, the Arabs appear as an organic component of the Fertile Crescent history rather than mere desert raiders.

The essay presents the lost archive of the Jewish author Zalman Shneour (Shklov 1887 – New York 1950). It was found in May 2018 at Calle Eraso 21 in Madrid – the city through which he had passed in the summer of 1941. Four carton boxes survived in the apartment of his late daughter, Renee Rebecca Shneour, who fled to New York together with her father but returned to live in Madrid in her adulthood. The essay offers a reading of Shneour's correspondences with three women - his mother in Shklov, his friend and lover in Berlin, and his daughter.

We are pleased to present our readers with this double issue of Massorot , volume 21–22, published by the Center for Jewish Languages and Literatures in collaboration with the Jewish Oral Traditions Research Center. The volume contains eleven articles which testify to the varied interests of contemporary scholars in the field of Jewish languages and the Hebrew traditions of the diverse communities of the Jewish People. Five of the articles concern themselves with Bible translations in Jewish languages, four of these in varieties of Judeo-Arabic: Moshe Bar-Asher discusses the conservative features of the Sharḥ (Judeo-Arabic calque translations transmitted orally) in the Maghreb. Shay Matsa deals with the last Judeo-Arabic Bible translation from Aleppo and its author. Ibrahim Bassal scrutinizes the interplay of elements from the Tafsīr of Saadiah Gaon and the Syriac Bible tradition in a Christian Arabic Bible translation. Zahi Abbas discusses the distinctive features of Saadiah Gaon’s Judeo-Arabic Bible translation. Yaffa Israeli analyzes translations of the Book of Jonah in three different regional dialects of Jewish Neo-Aramaic, from Urmi, Saqqiz and Rawanduz. Another two articles are concerned with other aspects of Judeo-Arabic in North Africa: Paul B. Fenton discusses three Judeo-Arabic historical dirges, two from the Tafilalt region and one from Algiers. Mor Daniel analyzes the forms of the plural used in the Judeo-Arabic of newspapers published in Tunis at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Two articles in the volume deal with Jewish Romance languages: Ora (Rodrigue) Schwarzwald offers the fruit of her research into the Passover Haggadah published in Sofia in Cyrillic letters. Michael Ryzhik focuses on the linguistic features of two Judeo-Italian dramas in Latin letters. Two articles in the volume are concerned with the Hebrew language traditions of different Jewish communities: Mor Shemesh analyzes the whole plural forms of segholate nouns in the reading of the Mishnah according to the late Ashkenazi tradition. Adam Bin-Nun discusses the link between the Yemenite version of the Torah text and that of Maimonides.

The Jewish Haskalah movement heralded a profound, unprecedented cultural-spiritual revolution in the Jewish world. Beginning in the German lands in the second half of the eighteenth century and subsequently spreading to central Europe, it called for reconstituting traditional Jewish society in line with maskilic values. This volume spotlights the early-nineteenth-century Galician Haskalah. Although a backwater annexed to the Austrian Empire from Poland but two generations earlier, Galicia’s impressive gallery of outstanding individuals and literary activity has granted the Galician Haskalah its place as one of the most productive, influential centers of the Haskalah movement. This collection of articles is based on lectures delivered at the "Revealers of Secrets—200 Years of Galician Haskalah" conference. Held in Jerusalem in 2013, this fifth annual conference for the study of the Haskalah movement aimed to submit the Galician Haskalah to renewed scholarly examination. Organized in five sections, the volume’s twenty-three essays by outstanding scholars portray the variegated aspects of this movement, which ranged from attempts to preserve Jewish identity by nurturing modern Jewish culture in Hebrew to radical attempts to reform traditional Jewish society.

In the current book two of the most prolific authors in the area of Medieval Judeo-Arabic and poetic Hebrew Medieval texts go back to its basic theses on the relations between Hebrew literature and its parallel Arabic and Judeo-Arabic texts. By re-establishing an up-to-date picture they are attacking the field of encounters from new and different angles.

The starting point for any study of the Bible is the text of the Masora, as designed by the Masoretes. The ancient manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible contain thousands of Masora comments of two types: Masora Magna and Masora Prava. This book presents the way in which the Masoretic comments preserve the Masoretic Text of the Bible throughout generations and all over the world, providing comprehensive information in a short and efficient manner. The book describes the important manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, and the methods of the Masora in determining the biblical spelling and designing the forms of the parshiot and the biblical Songs. The effectiveness of Masoretic mechanisms and their degree of success in preserving the text is examined. A special explanation is offered for the phenomenon of qere and ketiv . The book discusses the place of the Masoretic text in the history of the Bible, the differences between the Babylonian Masora and that of Tiberias, the special status of the Aleppo Codex and the mystery surrounding it. Special attention is given to the comparison between the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex (B 19a). In addition, the book discusses the relationship between the Masora and other tangential domains: the grammar of the Hebrew language, the interpretation of the Bible, and the Halakha. The appendix to the book contains a description of books and computer software that are tools for researching the Masora. The book is based on the author's research and the research of the great scholars of the Masora in recent generations. It is a necessary tool for anyone interested in the text of the Bible and its crystallization.