Tag: Jewish Studies
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How to Check your Girsa (Text) of the Talmud using Hachi Garsinan
The Talmud, being a massive corpus, is often subject to questions of girsa—textual variants. This is a live question already in the Gemara itself, which occasionally treats girsa issues in the Mishnah (e.g., חסורי מחסרא והכי קתני). It is also a not uncommon issue raised by Rishonim, and then in the period of the Acharonim…
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How to Use Zotero to Organize your Research
Zotero is how I perform feats of research magic. I use it to: It’s like having a personally curated library. The first thing I do when I start a project is search my references and call up my reading notes. Zotero isn’t hard to use, but it has a learning curve and it can be…
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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Wikipedia
Like most scholars, my attitude towards Wikipedia used to be one of ire and resigned hostility. Then I learned to stop worrying and love the wiki. What happened to make me change my mind?
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54 Essential Books in Jewish Studies
The challenge of defining essential books in Jewish studies is as difficult as it is needed. Difficult, because there is so much important work out there and how do you choose what to include? Needed, because it takes experience to sift through the available books and interested readers rightfully want to know where to look.…
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How to Access Jewish Manuscripts
Updated: 27 February 2023. With so many Hebrew and Jewish manuscripts now digitized (though certainly not all), they are accessible to anyone with an internet connection. This means that anyone, not just scholars trained in codicology and paleography, can peek at these treasures and learn from them. As a medievalist, though not one who primarily…