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Talmud-ist Maimonides (1138-1204) urges to make exercise: One should work or exert himself in some other way. The rule is that he should engage his body and exert himself in a sweat-producing task each morning. Afterwards, he should rest slightly until he regains composure and [then, he should] eat. If he were to bathe in hot water after exerting himself, it would be beneficial. Afterwards, he should wait a short while and eat.

Forty-nine times the Bible mentions a perfect, pure blue, a color so magnificent and transcendent that it was all but impossible to describe. Yet, for most of the last 2,000 years, nobody has known exactly what “biblical blue” — called tekhelet in Hebrew — actually looked like or how it could be re-created. At the time of the Second Temple, which towered above Jerusalem until it was destroyed by the Romans, a blue dye of the same name was used to color the fabric used in the clothing of the high priests. Jewish men are still commanded to use a...

In 1889, an Italian librarian's faulty identification sentenced to archival obscurity an antique Torah scroll that has turned out to be the oldest complete such scroll in existence. This week, University of Bologna Professor Mauro Perani announced the results of carbon-14 tests authenticating the scroll's age as roughly 800 years old. The scroll dates to between 1155 and 1225, making it the oldest complete Torah scroll on record. Like all Torah scrolls, this one contains the full text of the five Books of Moses in Hebrew and is prepared according to strict standards for use during religious services. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------snip------------------ At...

Suppose you were standing on the stairs outside the New York Public Library, beside Leo Astor or Leo Lenox, who gaze with serene, marbled regard across the exuberant pandemonium of Midtown Manhattan. Suppose, also, you were to ask the panoply of patrons passing by to name the fictional character who best captures the essence of capitalism. Chances are, the names you’d hear most often would be of miserly or unscrupulous figures—Dickens’ unredeemed Ebenezer Scrooge, for example, or Gordon (“Greed is Good!”) Gecko, from the movie Wall Street. Even in December, no one heading up to the Main Reading Room is...

(This essay is based upon materials from my forthcoming, “The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism”, 2008, on Prometheus Books.) December 13th marked the 804th anniversary of the death of Maimonides (d. 1203, in Cairo), renowned Talmudist, philosopher, astronomer, and physician. The biography of this “second Moses,” is often cited by those who would extol the purported Muslim ecumenism of the high Middle Ages—particularly in “Andalusia,” or Muslim Spain, invariably accompanied by a denunciation of the fanatical intolerance of Christian Western Europe, during the same era. A particularly egregious example of this genre of loaded comparisons was made by Amartya Sen,...

Did the software in the cell, DNA, write itself? Is genetic information the only information that science has ever encountered that was not generated by an intelligent agent? These are some of the questions raised by the scientific and cultural war going on over Charles Darwin's theory and its modern challenger, intelligent design. In an April 6 Jerusalem Post op-ed, the writer and editor Larry Yudelson took me to task for arguing in numerous venues that the debate about Darwin is a crucial one for Jews who care about Judaism. If it was simply Yudelson offering his personal opinion that...

CAIRO--Maimonides, the great rabbi, philosopher and healer, died 800 years ago in Egypt, but for many of those years he kept on working. Over the centuries his presence was said to be felt in the little synagogue deep in the heart of Cairo's old Jewish Quarter where, legend had it, he taught his disciples in a basement room. For the Jews of the Levant, Maimonides the doctor was as important as Maimonides the theologian and codifier of Jewish law. So it was to his small shul, known as Rav Moshe, that Jews from across Egypt journeyed in hopes that the...

“Kingdom of Heaven”: Bin Laden’s Slanted Crusade Movie May 5, 2005 By Debbie Schlussel Mark Twain said, “History tells us that the truth is not hard to kill, but a lie told well is immortal.” “Kingdom of Heaven,” Ridley Scott’s extremely boring movie version of the Crusades, is Twain’s words in action. Scott is serial killer of truth—giving immortality to 1,000 lies—in this propaganda film. The wannabe-epic is being panned for its lack of accuracy by a host of Islam experts, like Robert Spencer. Crusades expert Jonathan Riley-Smith says it’s basically “Osama bin Laden’s version of History.” But the folks...

Will Jews begin proclaiming "Long live the king" in the near future? According to a group of 71 Jewish scholars who met this week in the Old City of Jerusalem in the form of a modern-day Sanhedrin – a duplicate of the religious tribunal which convened during the time of the Second Temple – a coronation day is growing closer. As one member of the group put it, "We would have liked it to happen yesterday. But we are willing to wait until tomorrow." There hasn't been a genuine Sanhedrin in Israel for nearly 1,600 years; the last one to...

The Vatican will loan the work of Moses Maimonides, one of Judaism's most celebrated rabbis and sages, to Israel this year in a gesture meant to improve relations between Catholics and Jews. Jewish community leaders said they are ecstatic to have the opportunity to study the Maimonides document, and at least three other medieval manuscripts. Rabbi Benjamin Blech, a professor at Yeshiva University in New York, said the gesture by the Vatican "strengthens the bonds between Jews and Christians." "We are asking a favor, they are showing us a kindness, to borrow these items," he said. A delegation of about...

Gibson's controversial film coincides closely with ancient Jewish writings. According to those who have seen a rough cut, Gibson's film depicts the death of Christ as occurring at the hands of the Romans but at the instigation of Jewish leaders, the priests of the Jerusalem Temple. The Anti-Defamation League charges that this recklessly stirs anti-Jewish hatred and demands that the film be edited to eliminate any suggestion of Jewish deicide.