Ophir Münz-Manor, Professor of Rabbinic Culture, is a specialist in Jewish liturgy and liturgical poetry from Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. His studies focus on the intersections with contemporary Christian texts as well as questions of ritual, performance and gender in late antique Near Eastern cultures. In recent years Prof. Münz-Manor has embarked on several projects that combine traditional literary analysis with quantitative and computerized methods from the realm of Digital Humanities.
In October 2019 Prof. Münz-Manor has been appointed Dean of Academic Studies.
This special issue of Jewish Studies Quarterly explores the prospects of Digital Humanities (DH) ... more This special issue of Jewish Studies Quarterly explores the prospects of Digital Humanities (DH) for the academic study of Judaism in various his- torical and disciplinal context. In recent decades DH theories, practices and tools have expanded considerably, and new scholarly opportunities have emerged. At the same time, the rapid expansion of DH and its quantitative approach are raising questions and debates, theoretical and practical, con- cerning its usefulness and appropriateness to the Humanities. This issue includes five essays that touch upon these questions in dif- ferent time periods and disciplines. Irene Zwiep’s “A Farewell to Foucault?” provides a theoretical reflection on DH in the context of Jewish Studies. In “Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine,” Michael Satlow describes this project and how it deals with a variety of challenges, including incorporating geographic and image data and creating open linked vocabularies. My “Quantifying Piyyut,” illustrates new possibilities in computational literary research with a case study: reexamination of a dissertation on figurative language in early Jewish liturgical poetry. In “‘From One End of the Earth to the Other End of the Earth’,” Zef Segal uses network analysis techniques to examine Jewish journalism at the end of the 19th century. And Renana Keydar’s “Mod- eling the Eichmann Trial” builds on scaled methodology to demonstrate that, contrary to the popular view of the trial, the court remained largely indifferent to the testimony of survivors and empirically substantiate the epistemic and discursive divide between perpetrators and victims.
האסופה כוללת מאמרים נבחרים מן המיטב העולמי של מדעי הרוח הדיגיטליים והמחקר החישובי בספרות ובתחומי ... more האסופה כוללת מאמרים נבחרים מן המיטב העולמי של מדעי הרוח הדיגיטליים והמחקר החישובי בספרות ובתחומי דעת הומניסטיים אחרים - כמעט כולם מתורגמים כאן לראשונה לעברית. קובץ ראשון מסוגו זה מציע מגוון נקודות מבט ייחודיות לדיון ביחסים הסבוכים בין פרשנות אנושית וניתוח ממוחשב
This volume explores the ways in which Jerusalem is represented in Psalms – from its position in ... more This volume explores the ways in which Jerusalem is represented in Psalms – from its position in the context of liturgical and pilgrim songs to its role as metaphor. Jerusalem in the Book of Psalms is the site of scenes of redemption, joy, and celebration of the proximity to God and the house of the Lord. But it is also the quintessential locus of loss, marked by cries over the devastating destruction of the Temple. These two antithetical poles of Jerusalem are expressed in both personal terms as well as within a collective framework. The bulk of the articles are devoted to questions of reception, to the ways in which the geographies of the Book of Psalms have travelled across their native bounds and entered other historical settings, acquiring new forms and meanings.
A collection of sixty five piyyutim (Hebrew liturgical poems) from late antique Palestine. The bo... more A collection of sixty five piyyutim (Hebrew liturgical poems) from late antique Palestine. The book features a general introduction to Piyyut, glossary of literary terms and bibliography. The books' eleven sections are dedicated to the works of various poets from the fourth to eight centuries. Each section is prefaced and each poem is annotated.
The task of Style Transfer (ST) in Natural Language Processing (NLP), involves altering the style... more The task of Style Transfer (ST) in Natural Language Processing (NLP), involves altering the style of a given sentence to match another target style while preserving its semantics. Currently, the availability of Hebrew models for NLP, specifically generative models, is scarce. The development of such models is a non-trivial task due to the complex nature of Hebrew. The Hebrew language presents notable challenges to NLP as a result of its rich morphology, intricate inflectional structure, and orthography, which have undergone significant transformations throughout its history. In this work, we propose a generative ST model of modern Hebrew language that rewrites sentences to a target style in the absence of parallel style corpora. Our focus is on the domain of Modern Hebrew literature, which presents unique challenges for the ST task. To overcome the lack of parallel data, we initially create a pseudo-parallel corpus using back translation (BT) techniques for the purpose of achieving text simplification. Subsequently, we fine-tune a pre-trained Hebrew language model (LM) and leverage a zero-shot Learning (ZSL) approach for ST. Our study demonstrates significant achievements in terms of transfer accuracy, semantic similarity, and fluency in the ST of source sentence to a target style using our model. Notably, to the best of our knowledge, no prior research has focused on the development of ST models specifically for Modern Hebrew literature. As such, our proposed model constitutes a novel and valuable contribution to the field of Hebrew NLP, Modern Hebrew Literature and more generally computational literary studies.
In the article, we present, theorize and contextualize an investigation of figurative language in... more In the article, we present, theorize and contextualize an investigation of figurative language in a corpus of Hebrew liturgical poetry from late antiquity, from both a manual and a computational point of view. The study touches upon questions of distribution and patterns of usage of figures of speech as well as their literary-historical meanings. Focusing on figures of speech such as metaphors and similes, the corpus was first annotated manually with markers on papers, and a few years later it was annotated manually again, this time in a computer-assisted way, following a strictly categorized approach, using CATMA (an online literary annotation tool). The data was then transferred into ViS-À-ViS (an online visualization tool, developed by Münz-Manor and his team) that enables scholars to "see the wood" via various visualizations that single out, inter alia, repetitive patterns either at the level of the text or the annotations. The tool also enables one to visualize aggregated results concerning more than one text, allowing one to "zoom out" and see the "forest aspect" of the entire corpus or parts thereof. Interestingly, after visualizing the material in this way, it often turns out that the categories themselves need to be reassessed. In other words, the categorization and visualization in themselves create a sort of hermeneutical circle in which both parts influence one another reciprocally.
in C. D. Bergmann, T. Rajak, B. Kranenmann and R. Ulrich (eds.), The Power of Psalms in Post-Bili... more in C. D. Bergmann, T. Rajak, B. Kranenmann and R. Ulrich (eds.), The Power of Psalms in Post-Bilical Judaism - Liturgy, Ritual and Community, Leiden 2023, pp. 133-146
Computational-quantitative study in the humanistic disciplines has been increasing steadily in re... more Computational-quantitative study in the humanistic disciplines has been increasing steadily in recent years. Research in this digital environment makes pos- sible innovative approaches to well-established methods, raises questions that could not have been asked in the past, and sometimes change the hermeneuti- cal perspective. This article illustrates new possibilities in computational literary research with a case study: reexamination of a dissertation on figurative language in early piyyut. For this reassessment, detailed literary analyses were uploaded into CATMA, a web-based annotation tool, and explored using its visualization capabil- ities, as well as vis-À-vis, a pattern recognition web-service, and other statistical methods. Comparison of the analog and digital explorations developed by the author corroborated some of the old findings and refuted others. Distant reading techniques fleshed out new insights. All in all, this article seeks to promote a sober and accessible Digital Humanities that do not strive to replace traditional human- istic methods, but to provide scholars with new tools and approaches.
מחקרי ירושלים בספרות עברית לב (תשפ״א), 98-69, 2021
Computational-quantitative study in the humanistic disciplines has been increasing steadily in re... more Computational-quantitative study in the humanistic disciplines has been increasing steadily in recent years thanks to the accessibility of computers, the rise in digital literacy, and the rapid digitization of texts and artifacts. Research in this digital environment makes possible unorthodox approaches to well-established methods and raises questions that could not have been asked in the past. Tools that enhance human interpretation by means of computational power and processing big data- sets sometimes change the hermeneutical perspective. This article illustrates new possibilities in computational literary study with an interesting case study: a reexamination of my doctoral dissertation on figurative language in early Piyyut that was written fifteen years ago. The detailed literary analyses from the dissertation were uploaded into CATMA, a web-based annotation tool, and were explored using visualization capabilities of the tool as well as other statistical methods. The comparison of the analog and digital explorations corroborated some of the findings of the dissertation and refuted others. More importantly, new insights were fleshed out using ‘distant reading’ techniques. All in all, the article seeks to promote a sober and accessible Digital Humanities that do not strive to replace traditional humanistic methods but to provide scholars with new tools and approaches.
We present a web-based system called ViS-À-ViS aiming to assist literary scholars in detecting re... more We present a web-based system called ViS-À-ViS aiming to assist literary scholars in detecting repetitive patterns in an annotated tex-tual corpus. Pattern detection is made possible using distant reading visualizations that highlight potentially interesting patterns. In addition , the system uses time-series alignment algorithms, and in particular, dynamic time warping (DTW), to detect patterns automatically. We present a case-study where an ancient Hebrew poetry corpus was manually annotated with figurative language devices such as metaphors and similes and then loaded into the system. Preliminary results confirm the effectiveness of the system in analyzing the annotated data and in detecting literary patterns and similarities.
The article seeks to fill a gap in the study of late antique Jewish texts concerning the Hasmonea... more The article seeks to fill a gap in the study of late antique Jewish texts concerning the Hasmoneans. Historical discussions concerning the Hasmonean revolt and dynasty focus almost exclusively on rabbinic literature. However, alongside the rabbinic texts there existed piyyutim that were performed in public during the eight days of Hanukkah and in many of them we find meaningful representations of the Hasmoneans and their deeds. The article examines these payytanic traditions and demonstrates their unique contributed to the image of the Hasmonean as we know it from rabbinic texts. The discussion builds on piyyutim that were published from Genizah manuscripts in the course of the twentieth century and presents, for the first time, a critical edition of two new piyyutim that were only recently discovered. All in all, the article exemplify how the incorporation of payytanic literature to the study of late antique Judaism enriches the historical picture and offers a more nuances outlook.
in J. Yeshaya, E. Hollender, N. Katsumata (eds.), The Poet and the World - Festschrift for Wout van Bekkum on the Occasion of His Sixty-fifth Birthday (Berlin: De Gruyter 2019), pp. 93-105., 2019
The article focuses on El'azar berabbi Qillir, the iconic pay�an of all ages, and explores severa... more The article focuses on El'azar berabbi Qillir, the iconic pay�an of all ages, and explores several aspects of his work, heritage and cultural significance. The var- ious parts of the article do not present a cohesive image of the life and work of the Qilliri. Rather, they present a mosaic of different outlooks on his image as well as scholarly reflections on some of his major contributions to Jewish literary culture.
in I. Pardes, O. Münz-Manor (eds.), Psalms In/On Jerusalem (Berlin: De Gruyter 2019), pp. 27-42. , 2019
This article is dedicated to a literary and ritual examination of a qina [Hebrew, elegy] that dat... more This article is dedicated to a literary and ritual examination of a qina [Hebrew, elegy] that dates to the fourth or fifth century C.E. The elegy juxtaposes the lament on the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple with verses from the Book of Psalms and with an extraordinary lament of the signs of the zodiac. It belongs to a special payytanic genre for the Ninth of Av, the fast day commemorating the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. The author of the qina is unknown and the work was transmitted to us in manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah and from medieval Europe. It is a short elegy, consisting of twenty-two verses and a refrain that appears after every two verses.Thematically, the elegy presents a lament on Jerusalem by the signs of the zodiac, a rather unusual theme in Jewish texts from this period.
We do not know how hymns in Late Antiquity sounded. We do know that refrains became an important ... more We do not know how hymns in Late Antiquity sounded. We do know that refrains became an important aspect of hymnody in the period, not only among Christians in the capital accustomed to acclamations, but also among Hebrew-speaking Jews and Syriac-speaking Christians further east. This article investigates ways that the refrains contributed to shaping soundscapes or sonic space. The article constitutes a study of three of the era's most outstanding liturgical poets: Yose ben Yose and Yannai who wrote piyyutim in Hebrew and Romanos the Melodist who wrote kontakia in Greek. Refrains should ring loudly, and all three poets show a distinct awareness of the refrain's ability to shape the performative space. Throughout the song, the refrain would return repeatedly as an echo and saturate the room with loud voices. The hymnographers used this feature semantically, to dye the soundscapes with highly charged or pregnant notions, so that eventually the singing of the songs themselves gave way to the experience of community and deliverance. Conducted by poets, voices gathered to create soundscapes of salvation.
This article examines two literary works of the maqama genre: The Book of Tahkemoni by Judah Alha... more This article examines two literary works of the maqama genre: The Book of Tahkemoni by Judah Alharizi (13th century) and Sefer Hamusar by Zachariah Aldahiri (16th century). Both texts share genre, language and literary tradition, and they both integrate travel narratives that combine fact and fiction in interesting ways. By way of comparison, the article explores the dynamics between the real and the imaginative in the texts, and elaborates on the similarities and differences between them. Several conclusions concerning the literary and historical characteristics of both texts are singled out, and finally the article makes a distinction between Alha- rizi’s linear-transformative travel narrative and Aldahiri’s circular-confirmatory one.
This special issue of Jewish Studies Quarterly explores the prospects of Digital Humanities (DH) ... more This special issue of Jewish Studies Quarterly explores the prospects of Digital Humanities (DH) for the academic study of Judaism in various his- torical and disciplinal context. In recent decades DH theories, practices and tools have expanded considerably, and new scholarly opportunities have emerged. At the same time, the rapid expansion of DH and its quantitative approach are raising questions and debates, theoretical and practical, con- cerning its usefulness and appropriateness to the Humanities. This issue includes five essays that touch upon these questions in dif- ferent time periods and disciplines. Irene Zwiep’s “A Farewell to Foucault?” provides a theoretical reflection on DH in the context of Jewish Studies. In “Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine,” Michael Satlow describes this project and how it deals with a variety of challenges, including incorporating geographic and image data and creating open linked vocabularies. My “Quantifying Piyyut,” illustrates new possibilities in computational literary research with a case study: reexamination of a dissertation on figurative language in early Jewish liturgical poetry. In “‘From One End of the Earth to the Other End of the Earth’,” Zef Segal uses network analysis techniques to examine Jewish journalism at the end of the 19th century. And Renana Keydar’s “Mod- eling the Eichmann Trial” builds on scaled methodology to demonstrate that, contrary to the popular view of the trial, the court remained largely indifferent to the testimony of survivors and empirically substantiate the epistemic and discursive divide between perpetrators and victims.
האסופה כוללת מאמרים נבחרים מן המיטב העולמי של מדעי הרוח הדיגיטליים והמחקר החישובי בספרות ובתחומי ... more האסופה כוללת מאמרים נבחרים מן המיטב העולמי של מדעי הרוח הדיגיטליים והמחקר החישובי בספרות ובתחומי דעת הומניסטיים אחרים - כמעט כולם מתורגמים כאן לראשונה לעברית. קובץ ראשון מסוגו זה מציע מגוון נקודות מבט ייחודיות לדיון ביחסים הסבוכים בין פרשנות אנושית וניתוח ממוחשב
This volume explores the ways in which Jerusalem is represented in Psalms – from its position in ... more This volume explores the ways in which Jerusalem is represented in Psalms – from its position in the context of liturgical and pilgrim songs to its role as metaphor. Jerusalem in the Book of Psalms is the site of scenes of redemption, joy, and celebration of the proximity to God and the house of the Lord. But it is also the quintessential locus of loss, marked by cries over the devastating destruction of the Temple. These two antithetical poles of Jerusalem are expressed in both personal terms as well as within a collective framework. The bulk of the articles are devoted to questions of reception, to the ways in which the geographies of the Book of Psalms have travelled across their native bounds and entered other historical settings, acquiring new forms and meanings.
A collection of sixty five piyyutim (Hebrew liturgical poems) from late antique Palestine. The bo... more A collection of sixty five piyyutim (Hebrew liturgical poems) from late antique Palestine. The book features a general introduction to Piyyut, glossary of literary terms and bibliography. The books' eleven sections are dedicated to the works of various poets from the fourth to eight centuries. Each section is prefaced and each poem is annotated.
The task of Style Transfer (ST) in Natural Language Processing (NLP), involves altering the style... more The task of Style Transfer (ST) in Natural Language Processing (NLP), involves altering the style of a given sentence to match another target style while preserving its semantics. Currently, the availability of Hebrew models for NLP, specifically generative models, is scarce. The development of such models is a non-trivial task due to the complex nature of Hebrew. The Hebrew language presents notable challenges to NLP as a result of its rich morphology, intricate inflectional structure, and orthography, which have undergone significant transformations throughout its history. In this work, we propose a generative ST model of modern Hebrew language that rewrites sentences to a target style in the absence of parallel style corpora. Our focus is on the domain of Modern Hebrew literature, which presents unique challenges for the ST task. To overcome the lack of parallel data, we initially create a pseudo-parallel corpus using back translation (BT) techniques for the purpose of achieving text simplification. Subsequently, we fine-tune a pre-trained Hebrew language model (LM) and leverage a zero-shot Learning (ZSL) approach for ST. Our study demonstrates significant achievements in terms of transfer accuracy, semantic similarity, and fluency in the ST of source sentence to a target style using our model. Notably, to the best of our knowledge, no prior research has focused on the development of ST models specifically for Modern Hebrew literature. As such, our proposed model constitutes a novel and valuable contribution to the field of Hebrew NLP, Modern Hebrew Literature and more generally computational literary studies.
In the article, we present, theorize and contextualize an investigation of figurative language in... more In the article, we present, theorize and contextualize an investigation of figurative language in a corpus of Hebrew liturgical poetry from late antiquity, from both a manual and a computational point of view. The study touches upon questions of distribution and patterns of usage of figures of speech as well as their literary-historical meanings. Focusing on figures of speech such as metaphors and similes, the corpus was first annotated manually with markers on papers, and a few years later it was annotated manually again, this time in a computer-assisted way, following a strictly categorized approach, using CATMA (an online literary annotation tool). The data was then transferred into ViS-À-ViS (an online visualization tool, developed by Münz-Manor and his team) that enables scholars to "see the wood" via various visualizations that single out, inter alia, repetitive patterns either at the level of the text or the annotations. The tool also enables one to visualize aggregated results concerning more than one text, allowing one to "zoom out" and see the "forest aspect" of the entire corpus or parts thereof. Interestingly, after visualizing the material in this way, it often turns out that the categories themselves need to be reassessed. In other words, the categorization and visualization in themselves create a sort of hermeneutical circle in which both parts influence one another reciprocally.
in C. D. Bergmann, T. Rajak, B. Kranenmann and R. Ulrich (eds.), The Power of Psalms in Post-Bili... more in C. D. Bergmann, T. Rajak, B. Kranenmann and R. Ulrich (eds.), The Power of Psalms in Post-Bilical Judaism - Liturgy, Ritual and Community, Leiden 2023, pp. 133-146
Computational-quantitative study in the humanistic disciplines has been increasing steadily in re... more Computational-quantitative study in the humanistic disciplines has been increasing steadily in recent years. Research in this digital environment makes pos- sible innovative approaches to well-established methods, raises questions that could not have been asked in the past, and sometimes change the hermeneuti- cal perspective. This article illustrates new possibilities in computational literary research with a case study: reexamination of a dissertation on figurative language in early piyyut. For this reassessment, detailed literary analyses were uploaded into CATMA, a web-based annotation tool, and explored using its visualization capabil- ities, as well as vis-À-vis, a pattern recognition web-service, and other statistical methods. Comparison of the analog and digital explorations developed by the author corroborated some of the old findings and refuted others. Distant reading techniques fleshed out new insights. All in all, this article seeks to promote a sober and accessible Digital Humanities that do not strive to replace traditional human- istic methods, but to provide scholars with new tools and approaches.
מחקרי ירושלים בספרות עברית לב (תשפ״א), 98-69, 2021
Computational-quantitative study in the humanistic disciplines has been increasing steadily in re... more Computational-quantitative study in the humanistic disciplines has been increasing steadily in recent years thanks to the accessibility of computers, the rise in digital literacy, and the rapid digitization of texts and artifacts. Research in this digital environment makes possible unorthodox approaches to well-established methods and raises questions that could not have been asked in the past. Tools that enhance human interpretation by means of computational power and processing big data- sets sometimes change the hermeneutical perspective. This article illustrates new possibilities in computational literary study with an interesting case study: a reexamination of my doctoral dissertation on figurative language in early Piyyut that was written fifteen years ago. The detailed literary analyses from the dissertation were uploaded into CATMA, a web-based annotation tool, and were explored using visualization capabilities of the tool as well as other statistical methods. The comparison of the analog and digital explorations corroborated some of the findings of the dissertation and refuted others. More importantly, new insights were fleshed out using ‘distant reading’ techniques. All in all, the article seeks to promote a sober and accessible Digital Humanities that do not strive to replace traditional humanistic methods but to provide scholars with new tools and approaches.
We present a web-based system called ViS-À-ViS aiming to assist literary scholars in detecting re... more We present a web-based system called ViS-À-ViS aiming to assist literary scholars in detecting repetitive patterns in an annotated tex-tual corpus. Pattern detection is made possible using distant reading visualizations that highlight potentially interesting patterns. In addition , the system uses time-series alignment algorithms, and in particular, dynamic time warping (DTW), to detect patterns automatically. We present a case-study where an ancient Hebrew poetry corpus was manually annotated with figurative language devices such as metaphors and similes and then loaded into the system. Preliminary results confirm the effectiveness of the system in analyzing the annotated data and in detecting literary patterns and similarities.
The article seeks to fill a gap in the study of late antique Jewish texts concerning the Hasmonea... more The article seeks to fill a gap in the study of late antique Jewish texts concerning the Hasmoneans. Historical discussions concerning the Hasmonean revolt and dynasty focus almost exclusively on rabbinic literature. However, alongside the rabbinic texts there existed piyyutim that were performed in public during the eight days of Hanukkah and in many of them we find meaningful representations of the Hasmoneans and their deeds. The article examines these payytanic traditions and demonstrates their unique contributed to the image of the Hasmonean as we know it from rabbinic texts. The discussion builds on piyyutim that were published from Genizah manuscripts in the course of the twentieth century and presents, for the first time, a critical edition of two new piyyutim that were only recently discovered. All in all, the article exemplify how the incorporation of payytanic literature to the study of late antique Judaism enriches the historical picture and offers a more nuances outlook.
in J. Yeshaya, E. Hollender, N. Katsumata (eds.), The Poet and the World - Festschrift for Wout van Bekkum on the Occasion of His Sixty-fifth Birthday (Berlin: De Gruyter 2019), pp. 93-105., 2019
The article focuses on El'azar berabbi Qillir, the iconic pay�an of all ages, and explores severa... more The article focuses on El'azar berabbi Qillir, the iconic pay�an of all ages, and explores several aspects of his work, heritage and cultural significance. The var- ious parts of the article do not present a cohesive image of the life and work of the Qilliri. Rather, they present a mosaic of different outlooks on his image as well as scholarly reflections on some of his major contributions to Jewish literary culture.
in I. Pardes, O. Münz-Manor (eds.), Psalms In/On Jerusalem (Berlin: De Gruyter 2019), pp. 27-42. , 2019
This article is dedicated to a literary and ritual examination of a qina [Hebrew, elegy] that dat... more This article is dedicated to a literary and ritual examination of a qina [Hebrew, elegy] that dates to the fourth or fifth century C.E. The elegy juxtaposes the lament on the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple with verses from the Book of Psalms and with an extraordinary lament of the signs of the zodiac. It belongs to a special payytanic genre for the Ninth of Av, the fast day commemorating the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. The author of the qina is unknown and the work was transmitted to us in manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah and from medieval Europe. It is a short elegy, consisting of twenty-two verses and a refrain that appears after every two verses.Thematically, the elegy presents a lament on Jerusalem by the signs of the zodiac, a rather unusual theme in Jewish texts from this period.
We do not know how hymns in Late Antiquity sounded. We do know that refrains became an important ... more We do not know how hymns in Late Antiquity sounded. We do know that refrains became an important aspect of hymnody in the period, not only among Christians in the capital accustomed to acclamations, but also among Hebrew-speaking Jews and Syriac-speaking Christians further east. This article investigates ways that the refrains contributed to shaping soundscapes or sonic space. The article constitutes a study of three of the era's most outstanding liturgical poets: Yose ben Yose and Yannai who wrote piyyutim in Hebrew and Romanos the Melodist who wrote kontakia in Greek. Refrains should ring loudly, and all three poets show a distinct awareness of the refrain's ability to shape the performative space. Throughout the song, the refrain would return repeatedly as an echo and saturate the room with loud voices. The hymnographers used this feature semantically, to dye the soundscapes with highly charged or pregnant notions, so that eventually the singing of the songs themselves gave way to the experience of community and deliverance. Conducted by poets, voices gathered to create soundscapes of salvation.
This article examines two literary works of the maqama genre: The Book of Tahkemoni by Judah Alha... more This article examines two literary works of the maqama genre: The Book of Tahkemoni by Judah Alharizi (13th century) and Sefer Hamusar by Zachariah Aldahiri (16th century). Both texts share genre, language and literary tradition, and they both integrate travel narratives that combine fact and fiction in interesting ways. By way of comparison, the article explores the dynamics between the real and the imaginative in the texts, and elaborates on the similarities and differences between them. Several conclusions concerning the literary and historical characteristics of both texts are singled out, and finally the article makes a distinction between Alha- rizi’s linear-transformative travel narrative and Aldahiri’s circular-confirmatory one.
in M. Ahuvia , A. Kocar (eds.), Placing Ancient Texts: The Ritual and Rhetorical Use of Space (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2018), 87-98. , 2018
This essay examines several liturgical poems in which a correspondence exists between the texts a... more This essay examines several liturgical poems in which a correspondence exists between the texts and the space in which they were performed. A key term in my investigation is ekphrasis, a rhetorical technique common in classical Greco-Roman world that influenced late antique liturgical poets. I begin with a discussion of the impact of ekphrasis on Christian and Jewish poetic texts and continue with an examination of several poems that appropriate the ekphrastic technique and use it as part of their own liturgical and ritual practices. Finally, I situate these poems alongside the architecture and the artwork of the synagogues and churches of late antiquity in which they were performed.
This essay discusses recently discovered Hebrew liturgical poems from late antique Palestine that... more This essay discusses recently discovered Hebrew liturgical poems from late antique Palestine that shed new light on a passage in the Panarion where Epiphanius discusses the relationship between body and soul and presents a parable on a lame and a blind person. Epiphanius’ version of the parable has drawn the attention of scholars because of its likeness to rabbinic texts. Some 25 years ago Marc Bregman dedicated an article in the Journal of Theological Studies to the examination of Epiphanius’ versions vis-à-vis rabbinic traditions and offered some ingenious conclusions concerning the relationship between Christian and Jewish texts from Late Antiquity. The new poetic texts shed fresh light on Bregman’s conclusions, corroborating some of his assertions while casting doubt on others. In addition, the examination of the liturgical poems reveals the rich dynamics between prose and verse in contemporary Jewish literature. Finally, the essay singles out the importance of the study of late antique liturgical poetry in treatments of rabbinic and patristic writings.
מחקרי ירושלים בספרות עברית כח (תשע״ו), 112-93, 2016
The article is devoted to an examination of the relations between the payytanic epithet (Heb. Kin... more The article is devoted to an examination of the relations between the payytanic epithet (Heb. Kinnuy) and figurative language in Pre-Classical Piyyut (ca. fourth-fifth centuries CE). The poets used epithets when they did not wish to call a familiar concepts or figures by their proper name. Some scholars even suggested that the relatively limited use of figurative language in Piyyut relates to the extensive use of epithets. In the present article only those epithets which use figurative language are discussed. The article examines first instances in which the poet introduced original epithets. Then the more common epithets that are based on biblical figurative language are discussed. In addition the article investigates rare cases in which figurative poetic epithets are included in the broader development of figurative language in a single line or over a number of lines, and cases where an epithet interrupts a figurative sequence. The article is based on an analysis of numerous lines of poetry from the rich corpus of Pre-Classical Piyyut.
In: Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire: The Poetics of Power in Late Antiquity, A. Y. Reed, N. Dohrmann, eds. ,(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2013), pp. 154-166, 315-319., 2013
This essay focuses on liturgical texts that incorporate in sophisticated ways materials concernin... more This essay focuses on liturgical texts that incorporate in sophisticated ways materials concerning the creation of the universe in rituals of atonement and consecration of holy places of worship. I argue that the employment of accounts concerning creation resulted in a powerful experience that joined the revived biblical past with the present ritual needs of the liturgy. In the case of the Christian Anaphoras and the Jewish Avodah poems, the creation narratives enhanced the ritual of what might be called verbal sacrifice and in the case of the liturgical poems for Hanukah and their Christian counterparts, the association of the place of worship with the structure of the universe validated and enhanced their cosmic understanding.
Avraham Fraenkel, Abraham Gross, and Peter Sh. Lehnardt, eds. Hebräische liturgische Poesien zu den Judenverfolgungen während des Ersten Kreuzzugs. Hebräische Texte aus dem mittelalterlichen Deutschland, 3. Wiesbaden: Harrossowitz Verlag 2016, Dec 17, 2017
Published in: European Journal of Jewish Studies 11 (2017): 111–114
מספד שומרון: אסופת פיוטי אב... more Published in: European Journal of Jewish Studies 11 (2017): 111–114
מספד שומרון: אסופת פיוטי אבל, תוכחה ושבח יחידותו של האל, ירושלים: מוסד ביאליק, 2012
Samaritan Elegies: A Collection of Lamentations, Admonitions, and Poems of Praising God, Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2012
Review of Michael Rand's Introduction to the Grammar of Hebrew Poetry in Byzantine Palestine (Gor... more Review of Michael Rand's Introduction to the Grammar of Hebrew Poetry in Byzantine Palestine (Gorgias Dissertations 22, Language and Linguistics), Gorgias Press, Piscataway, New Jersey 2006.
Appeared in: Journal of Semitic Studies 54 (2009), pp. 595-597
סקירה של ספרם של אפרים חזן וישראל רוזנסון ׳דרושה, פקודה, שקולה - דיוקן ארץ ישראל בפיוטיה׳, הוצאת... more סקירה של ספרם של אפרים חזן וישראל רוזנסון ׳דרושה, פקודה, שקולה - דיוקן ארץ ישראל בפיוטיה׳, הוצאת כרמל, ירושלים 2014.
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This issue includes five essays that touch upon these questions in dif- ferent time periods and disciplines. Irene Zwiep’s “A Farewell to Foucault?” provides a theoretical reflection on DH in the context of Jewish Studies. In “Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine,” Michael Satlow describes this project and how it deals with a variety of challenges, including incorporating geographic and image data and creating open linked vocabularies. My “Quantifying Piyyut,” illustrates new possibilities in computational literary research with a case study: reexamination of a dissertation on figurative language in early Jewish liturgical poetry. In “‘From One End of the Earth to the Other End of the Earth’,” Zef Segal uses network analysis techniques to examine Jewish journalism at the end of the 19th century. And Renana Keydar’s “Mod- eling the Eichmann Trial” builds on scaled methodology to demonstrate that, contrary to the popular view of the trial, the court remained largely indifferent to the testimony of survivors and empirically substantiate the epistemic and discursive divide between perpetrators and victims.
This article illustrates new possibilities in computational literary study with an interesting case study: a reexamination of my doctoral dissertation on figurative language in early Piyyut that was written fifteen years ago. The detailed literary analyses from the dissertation were uploaded into CATMA, a web-based annotation tool, and were explored using visualization capabilities of the tool as well as other statistical methods. The comparison of the analog and digital explorations corroborated some of the findings of the dissertation and refuted others. More importantly, new insights were fleshed out using ‘distant reading’ techniques. All in all, the article seeks to promote a sober and accessible Digital Humanities that do not strive to replace traditional humanistic methods but to provide scholars with new tools and approaches.
All in all, the article exemplify how the incorporation of payytanic literature to the study of late antique Judaism enriches the historical picture and offers a more nuances outlook.
This issue includes five essays that touch upon these questions in dif- ferent time periods and disciplines. Irene Zwiep’s “A Farewell to Foucault?” provides a theoretical reflection on DH in the context of Jewish Studies. In “Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine,” Michael Satlow describes this project and how it deals with a variety of challenges, including incorporating geographic and image data and creating open linked vocabularies. My “Quantifying Piyyut,” illustrates new possibilities in computational literary research with a case study: reexamination of a dissertation on figurative language in early Jewish liturgical poetry. In “‘From One End of the Earth to the Other End of the Earth’,” Zef Segal uses network analysis techniques to examine Jewish journalism at the end of the 19th century. And Renana Keydar’s “Mod- eling the Eichmann Trial” builds on scaled methodology to demonstrate that, contrary to the popular view of the trial, the court remained largely indifferent to the testimony of survivors and empirically substantiate the epistemic and discursive divide between perpetrators and victims.
This article illustrates new possibilities in computational literary study with an interesting case study: a reexamination of my doctoral dissertation on figurative language in early Piyyut that was written fifteen years ago. The detailed literary analyses from the dissertation were uploaded into CATMA, a web-based annotation tool, and were explored using visualization capabilities of the tool as well as other statistical methods. The comparison of the analog and digital explorations corroborated some of the findings of the dissertation and refuted others. More importantly, new insights were fleshed out using ‘distant reading’ techniques. All in all, the article seeks to promote a sober and accessible Digital Humanities that do not strive to replace traditional humanistic methods but to provide scholars with new tools and approaches.
All in all, the article exemplify how the incorporation of payytanic literature to the study of late antique Judaism enriches the historical picture and offers a more nuances outlook.
מספד שומרון: אסופת פיוטי אבל, תוכחה ושבח יחידותו של האל, ירושלים: מוסד ביאליק, 2012
Samaritan Elegies: A Collection of Lamentations, Admonitions, and Poems of Praising God, Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2012
Appeared in: Journal of Semitic Studies 54 (2009), pp. 595-597
הסקירה התפרסמה במוסף ׳הארץ ספרים׳ , 11.9.2015
http://thegemara.com/body-or-soul-which-is-responsible-for-committing-sins/
http://thegemara.com/in-praise-of-the-hasmoneans-chanukah-beyond-rabbinic-literature/