✦ Published pieces
Before the Fall
Hasmoneans, Herod, four rival parties, and a civil war fought inside a Roman siege - the politics of the Second Temple period, told as the tribe's own hard-won cautionary memory.
Read the piece →The Decree That Built the Tribe of Learning
A high priest's school edict, a destroyed Temple, and the answer the rabbis gave in children's heads: that every Jewish child, everywhere, must learn to read - and the consequences of that decision are still running.
Read the piece →The Argument Moves Into Books
A sage smuggled out of a besieged city in a coffin, an academy established at Yavneh, and the pivot from a temple religion to a text civilisation that has been arguing with itself, productively, ever since.
Read the piece →The Cairo Geniza
A sealed storeroom in a Cairo synagogue held 400,000 fragments of medieval Jewish life. What the dry Egyptian air preserved rewrote the history of the whole medieval world.
Read the piece →Rashi
A medieval French scholar wrote a commentary so clear and so well-judged that it became inseparable from the text it explained. He did not set out to write the standard commentary. He wrote the one that worked.
Read the piece →Maimonides
In twelfth-century Egypt, one man organised all of Jewish law, reconciled Torah with Aristotle, and shaped Thomas Aquinas — while practising medicine full-time.
Read the piece →Abraham ibn Ezra
Poet, grammarian, astronomer, mathematician, biblical commentator — ibn Ezra produced his greatest work penniless and perpetually in motion across medieval Europe.
Read the piece →The Vilna Gaon
Rabbi Elijah of Vilna studied through the night, corrected manuscripts others thought untouchable, and shaped a tradition of textual rigour that outlasted every argument made against it.
Read the piece →The Torah Speaks Greek
In Alexandria the Torah was put into Greek for the first time - the book leaving home, and a diaspora keeping it alive in the language of its daily life.
Read the piece →Three Streams
Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes - one Temple, three answers about what God wanted. Only the stream that bet on the argument survived the fire.
Read the piece →The Portable Homeland
A people lost its Temple and built a book instead - the Babylonian Talmud, sealed in the academies of Sura and Pumbedita and carried for fourteen centuries.
Read the piece →The Scribes Who Fixed the Text
The Masoretes of Tiberias settled every vowel and accent of the Hebrew Bible - the system printed in every copy since, perfected in the Aleppo Codex.
Read the piece →Answers by Caravan
For four centuries the heads of the Babylonian academies answered halachic post from the whole Jewish world - a legal civilisation run by letter, without a state.
Read the piece →Nahmanides
Talmudist, mystic and exegete of Girona - compelled to debate a king's convert, he kept his dignity, then went home to rebuild a desolate Jerusalem.
Read the piece →He Set the Table
Yosef Karo's Shulchan Arukh, with Isserles' Ashkenazi gloss alongside - one shared code that knit a scattered people into a single practice, argued over ever since.
Read the piece →The Page That Never Changed
A Christian printer in Venice gave the Talmud its permanent form - the layout the Soncinos pioneered and the page numbers every edition still follows.
Read the piece →Rashi's Heirs
The Tosafists - Rashi's grandsons and their school - turned his commentary into a dialectical sport, reading the whole Talmud as one interlocking argument.
Read the piece →The First to Argue It Whole
Saadia Gaon translated the Bible into Arabic, wrote the first Jewish philosophy and the first grammar, and defended the tradition - the bridge from the geonim to the Rishonim.
Read the piece →The Mother of Yeshivas
In 1803 Chaim of Volozhin built the model Lithuanian yeshiva - Torah for its own sake, full-time - and trained the rabbinic leadership of generations.
Read the piece →When the Law Stood Up
With the Temple in ruins, Judah ha-Nasi gathered the Oral Torah into six orders and sixty-three tractates - the portable backbone every later argument would circle.
Read the piece →Don Isaac Abravanel
Abravanel served kings, lost kingdoms and kept writing: a statesman in exile who turned catastrophe into commentary.
Read the piece →Daf Yomi: The World on the Same Page
Since 1923, Daf Yomi has put Jews across the world on the same page of Talmud every day.
Read the piece →The Cairo Geniza's Afterlife
One scholar, two sacks and a mountain of discarded paper turned medieval Jewish life into something recoverable.
Read the piece →Onkelos and the Aramaic Targum
When Hebrew grew strange to many listeners, the synagogue read on in Aramaic, the language of the street.
Read the piece →In the workshop
- The Geonim
- Women and Learning
- The Daf Yomi