22 Feb 89 JUDAIC STUDIES #4 17 AdarI 49 BS"D Connecting geographically & otherwise disparate groups with a common interest in the study of Judaica. Under the auspices of Dr. Emanuel Tov, Bible Dept., Hebrew University. Edited by Y. Greenbaum. CONTENTS 1) Editorial Judgment 2) Events Revised 3) Research Libraries 4) Romanization Standards 5) Compact Disks 6) Linguistic Analyses 7) A bit more about online 1) Editorial Judgment Date: Fri, 17 Feb 89 11:29 EST Thank you for sending me the newsletter. Would it be possible to exercise a bit more editorial judgment? As a rule I think that the speed and immediacy of computer-transmitted information means that current information is particularly appropriate while general background tidbits are less so. Thus I was particularly surprised that you failed to give details of the Turkish Jewry lectures at Yad Ben-Zvi while you went into great detail about Binyan Mayzer. I would very much encourage you to try to gather lists of current lectures yimey iyun and other public activities in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel. Since these are generously advertised and often listed. I would hope that it would not be too much of a burden. Of course I understand that managing this project is quite enough so you may not have the time to gather what I am suggesting, but I think it would take advantage of the medium. Yechiel replies: Right on! The lack of listserve (may we establish it speedily and in our time) not only withholds the positive advantages of adding material as it becomes available, but draws tremendous amounts of time dealing with other parts of the system not built to take the volume of mail we send. But why should the world at large suffer from our inadequate planning? I was ready to send a supplement, revising the events listing, as soon as I received this letter. But I found that I'd made a second error- the Turkish Lectures are on the 26th. And the bulletin board outside the Institute for Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts has since become more plastered with invit- ations. Below is the revised listing. And remember that I am translating all titles and names from hebrew, which is difficult even after hearing the lecture. I'd like to add a word about academic titles. It's been suggested that I add Dr. to many of the names in the address list, in view of my statement last week that I'd do so in cases of uncertainty. If a friend supplies a name, I take it as is. In an education class, an acquaintance of mine said that he gives his each of his pupils the option of addressing him formally or informally, as they wish... we're speaking of a high school class here. In any case, as we approach listserve, please let me know if you want your address to be available to others and how you wish your name to appear. 2) Events Revised In the following listing, all lectures will be held at The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, on your left as you face the main building of Van Leer Institute, 43 Jabotinsky Rd., excepting those affiliated with Ben- Zvi, which will be held at their compound in Rehavia. 22 Feb 18:15 Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities Gershom Scholem Memorial Lecture (7th year of his passing) Prof. Joseph Dan The Divine Mystery of Those Who Descend to the Chariot 23 Feb 20:00 Ben Zvi Institute, Yad Ben-Zvi, and Hebrew University Annual Lecture in Memory of S. D. Goitein Speaker- Prof. Ezra Fleischer Chair- Prof. Shaul Shaked The Contribution of the Genizah to the Understanding of the Beginning of Our Poetics in Spain 24 Feb 10:00 Yad Ben-Zvi Prof. Yosef Shetreet The Hebrew Enlightenment Movement in North Africa at the End of the Nineteenth Century 26 Feb Ben Zvi Institute Research Topics in Turkish Jewry in the Modern Period 9:00 Cultural and Sociological Connections Before the Ottoman Turks Chair- Prof. Amnon Cohen Prof. Joseph R. Hacker (Hebrew U) Connections of the Jews of Istanbul With Travelers, Diplomats, and European Illuminatae in the 16th and 17th Centuries Dr. Renee Melammed (Ben Gurion U) Economic Connections Between Jews and Non-Jews According to the De Boton Responsa Dr. Yaakov Barnay (Haifa U) Conversion and Missionizing Among the of the Ottoman Empire Dr. Galit (Hasan) Rokem (Hebrew U) Dr. Tamar Alexander (Haifa U) Essentials of Time and Place in the Expressions of Turkish Jewry 11:15 With the Change of Eras Chair- Prof. Victor Azariah Prof. David Kushner (Haifa U) Guidelines of the Government of Turkey Towards Minorities Dr. Aron Rodrigue (Indiana U, Bloomington) Europe and the Westernization of Turkish Jewry 1839-1923 Dr. Esther Benbassa (Institut d'Etudes Juives, Paris) European Jewry, Zionism and Ottoman Jewish Nationalism in the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Dr. Avner Levi (Hebrew U) Turkish Jewry and the Establishment of the Turkish Republic 1 Mar 20:00 Misgav Yerushalayim Institute for research on the Sepharadi and Oriental Jewish Heritage Annual Lecture in Memory of Eliahu Eliachar (on the 7th year) Speaker- Dr. Abraham David Chair- Judge Moshe Hason The Jews of Egypt after the Expulsion from Spain in Light of New Sources from the Genizah 2 Mar 20:00 Zalman Shazar Center For Jewish History Speaker- Dr. Yaakov Tsur Chair- Prof. Dov Kolka New Areas in the Study of German Jewry in the Holocaust Period 3) Research Libraries We have received the following communication from John Eilts of the Research Libraries Group: Date: Fri, 17 Feb 89 09:42:01 PST I have just received a copy of your first electronic newsletter in Judaic Studies. I would like to receive future issues. My electronic mail address is: BL.JAE@RLG.BITNET. I work for the Research Libraries Group, which is a not for profit corporation owned and operated by a consortium of 38 major research institutions in the US (Stanford University, our host institution is one of them). We operate an international bibliographic network (RLIN) in support of our members cooperative programs. One of the new programs is in Jewish studies. The following are stated goals of the program in Jewish and Middle East Studies of RLG. 1. Cooperative Collection Development: continue task force subcommittee review of Judaica data in the Conspectus; cooperate with subcommittee of CMDC in review of Middle East data in Conspectus; identify any subject areas that are not adequately covered for possible cooperative collection development efforts. 2. Cooperative bibliographic control/cataloging: build the database of Hebraic script data; advise in the development of the Arabic script capabilities; following on the Conspectus review, participants will coordinate retrospective cataloging of their collections. 3. Cooperative Preservation: develop a plan for collection condition evaluations and identify "collections at risk"; consider, in cooperation with the RLG Preservation Committee, options and priorities for preservation project proposals which would focus on particularly strong collections identified during the Conspectus review. 4. Shared Resources: once the program membership is established, the group will consider on-site access guides to collections in Jewish and Middle East Studies. A planning meeting will be held later this spring. For further information contact: John Eilts, Research Libraries Group, Inc., 1200 Villa Street, Mountain View, CA 94041-1100. Telephone: (415)691-2266. Yechiel comments: The most recent issue of Judaica Librarianship carried an article by Elchanan Adler encouraging the benefits of cooperative cataloging i.e. we are better equipped to catalog Hebraica in Israel, but hardpressed to romanize titles and provide other minutae required by AACR2. We certainly have alot to offer in the area of Judaica reference. 4) Romanization Systems Romanization (converting to roman letters, usually reversible, unlike transliteration) is a topic of interest to librarians (for bibliographic control and standardization), as well as those of us who wish to use roman-friendly systems to deal with hebrew characters. The following letter came from the third Gale we've heard of to date: From: Robert Gale Date: Fri, 17 Feb 89 09:52:04 est An issue of special interest for me: What is the usual convention for transcribing Hebrew characters for e-mail? Yechiel responds: Before attempting to answer this innocent-looking, two-line question, I'm going to list all the systems I can remember off-hand. If anyone knows of any others, please let us know. Libraries: Cambridge (T.S. Genizah Project) Harvard (Widener) Annenberg Institute NYPL version of ANSI ALA/LC E Mail: Israeli standard There also exist several versions of coding for hebrew characters per se. 5) Compact Disks From: KRAFT@PENNDRLS Date: Friday, 17 February 1989 1110-EST In general, at some point in the discussion of available data and of multilingual displays (Hebrew included), the Newsletter should probably mention the fact that some texts (e.g. Hebrew Bible, Targums Ps-Jonathan and Neofiti and Job, Greek Bible, English Bible, etc.) are readily available on diskettes (IBM and MAC) and on tape and on CD-ROM from CCAT, for immediate use on the IBYCUS Scholarly Computer, and with more difficulty on MAC and IBM (with reference to screen display, searching, browsing, etc.). If you need some details on such matters, I can point you in the right directions -- e.g. John Hughes, Bits, Bytes & Biblical Studies (Zondervan, 1987) gives heaps of detail on such matters. Bob Kraft (CCAT) Yechiel adds: Bits & Bytes Review can be contacted at XB.J24@Stanford From: Don Feinberg Date: 17 Feb 89 09:42 Subject: Gemara on the CDROM (from HUG last time) ... imagine what could be done with optical >disks: the entire Torah with all rabbinic and even modern >commentators could easily be contained on one disk. Likewise, the >entire Babylonian Talmud. (We admit we're not sure that the whole >Talmud and its commentaries would fit on one disk!-- Does anyone >out there know?) Perhaps one CD could hold most or all of the great >codes. One thing is for sure, within a short time, we will all have >far greater access to classical Jewish thought. This is not too hard a question to answer. The average CDROM holds about 600 million bytes (characters) of information (formatted!). [And I made some experimental disks, when I was building the first CDROM mastering system with Philips, which were about 700 million bytes, but that's another story.] Anyway, I'll assume for a first case that we are representing the Gemara "bli nikudot," and "bli trop." Guaranteed, that will fit into an 8-bit-per-character encoding. So, how big is the Gemara? I don't have one here in my office, but I guess that it's around 8000 folio-sized "sides" (not Gemara "pages"). There would be something like 7000 characters on a maximal page. That makes the total length something about 50 million characters, or bytes. So, even if I'm off in my estimates by an order of magnitude, the Gemara will quite comfortably fit on one CDROM. You can easily see that even if the encoding is 16-bit-per-character (to allow for nikudot, trop, and font selection [block vs. Rashi, etc.]), say, we still only need 100 or so million characters. That's still QUITE comfortable. (By way of comparison, the Encyclopedia Britannica will fit quite nicely, three (or so) times, on a CDROM.) Don Feinberg Digital Equipment Corp Marlboro, MA, USA / Herzliya, Israel It was rumored awhile ago that Bar Ilan had already put its material on CD-ROM, or was ready to do so. I called a few weeks ago, however, and was told they're at least a year away from anything. 6) Linguistic Analyses From: Jeroen de Jong Date: Mon, 20 Feb 89 15:45:31 MET Topics of interest for me would be: * linguistic studies in (classic, tannaitic, medieval and modern) Hebrew * computer applications dealing with the Hebrew language (no matter what kind of application; an index program for a Hebrew text is as interesting as, e.g., automatic syntactic analysis) * studies in the development of Biblical texts, especially linguistic based ones. E.g., I would like to hear from people who investigate the possibility of dating Biblical texts on linguistic grounds. Most interesting would be to hear from people who disagree with (one of the) documentary hypothesis/es. Shalom velehitra'ot, Jeroen de Jong. I know at least one person who did such work on Genesis. I don't believe he's e-connected as yet, but I'll try to put him in touch. 7) A bit more about online Date: Mon, 20 Feb 89 14:06 EST Bar Ilan does not at present allow new hookups, though Univ. of Toronto has one. It's a pity that such a valuable data base is not available to those who could use it. Shalom, Joe [Baumgarten] Yeshiva U has had a connection, at times. How many people or institutions out there would like to group together to encourage some sort of action? Subscribe to a future CD-ROM? Consort to a common connection? NEXT WEEK- Date: 21 Feb 89 18:51 Yechiel, In newletter # 2 you promise "Next time- lists" - I would be especially interested in seeing lists of U.S. institution which offer graduate studies in JS. If this is what you have in fact done in newsletter # 3, I wonder if you could please send me a 'back-issue'. Thanks, Kathy Rosenbluh #3's "next week" promised that I'd explain why there weren't any lists in it. I have such a list, or the makings of one, although not in electronic form. I hope we will soon be on a listserver, and that it will save me enough time so that I can cook up some lists to serve. Furthermore, I have no time (or space) now for last weeks promised "remarks on chronology", and I haven't yet had the opportunity to gather all the orthography corrections of acknowledgments. "Next week" topics ought be viewed more as an aspiration than a promise. In any case, I'll always hope to give precedence to what people send, before creating my own subjects of discussion. so, NEXT WEEK- listserve (I hope)