Review: The Adventures of Max Spitzkopf by Jonas Kreppel

Synopsis: Max Spitzkopf, the Yiddish Sherlock Holmes, “heads the famous Viennese detective bureau Blitz . . . He’s bold as a lion and takes the wildest risks.” Meet Max Spitzkopf: legendary private eye, undefeated foe of villains, and passionate defender of the Jewish people. No matter how hopeless or dangerous the case, when “the investigatory profession’s greatest artist” is summoned, justice is assured. Aided by his trusty assistant, Fuchs, super-sleuth Spitzkopf deploys equal parts physical bravery and intellectual ingenuity— not to mention a knack for stealthy disguise—to unpick evil conspiracies, outwit the canniest of criminals, and restore moral order to the world.

Giving a unique twist to a beloved literary genre, this complete collection of the fifteen Spitzkopf mysteries is also a vibrant testament to Jewish life, in all its variety, during the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Reading the tales, with every iota of their linguistic verve and historical charm preserved in Mikhl Yashinsky’s translation, it’s easy to see why the young Isaac Bashevis Singer thought them “masterpieces.”

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Highly engaging collection of fifteen short stories featuring a Jewish detective, written in the style of Conan Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes". The stories are set in and around Vienna in the 1920s, and deal with issues pertaining to the Jewish community and their dealings with those who are outside it.

Max Spitzkopf is a well respected (licensed) detective, and is accompanied by his Watson - Hermann Fuchs - who always seems to get himself into one scrape after another, resulting in a bash on the head, imprisonment and escape. Spitzkopf is inundated with cases from the seemingly banal to issues of national importance. As Spitzkopf bemoaned to Fuchs: “I would need at least ten heads, along with twenty eyes, twenty ears, and twenty pairs of hands and feet, to take on all of the cases these people wish to drop into my lap.”

Themes dealt with include religious bigotry, racism, murder, revenge, persecution, marriage, gang violence, espionage, forged wills, kidnappings, disappearing persons, - so if you have read your Holmes, you will feel at home with Spitzkopf. Like Holmes, Spitzkopf makes use of his assistants to do the leg-work, dons disguises himself, and throws out red herrings when on the trial of his mark. All cases are solved when the detective takes centre stage to unveil the villains and lay the matter to rest. And the villains always receive their dues.

Each of the stories follows in sequence and this is indicated by references at the beginning of the next tale. They are each in turn set out with a number of small chapters. As Yashinsky points out in his introduction, the stories of Spitzkopf were originally written as fifteen ".. pulp-fiction pamphlets that told his stories and cost only twenty Austrian heller for each shabby little shocker of thrity-two pages, published in Kraków around 1908."

I welcomed the opportunity to explore and savour a new detective series and highly recommend investing some time with Spitzkopf, the Yiddish Sherlock Holmes.

Towards Tolerance: Christian Appeals to Jews in the Middle Ages

From National Catholic Register:

The notion of a “persecuting society” has achieved an unwarranted acceptance among many medievalists, who now merely assume that raw hatred, hunger for power and the creation of a homogenous society was at the core of the Church’s treatment of nonbelievers — pagans, Muslims and, most problematically, Jews — rather than any sincere concern for the salvation of souls.

Edmund Mazza, a professor of history at Azusa Pacific University in Los Angeles, attempts to refocus current scholarly assumptions about the Jewish-Christian dynamic in The Scholastics and the Jews: Coexistence, Conversion and the Medieval Origins of Tolerance.

Mazza’s book is a fine work of scholarship examining key figures and texts on the road toward religious tolerance in the Middle Ages. It’s a valuable step toward reorienting this dialogue away from crude, ahistorical anti-Catholic polemic and toward something more fact-based, which is why it’s so jarring to find a political preface almost scuttling the project on the first page. 

Mazza’s goal is not a whitewashing of Christian misdeeds against the Jews, but an unfolding of the more complex interactions — social, political, pastoral and theological — of the Christians and unbelievers in the Middle Ages.

Jewish life in ancient Afghanistan and Persia

Ynetnews Jewish Scene - Rare documents shed light on Jewish life in ancient Afghanistan and Persia

A rare collection of 250 documents from the 11th to the 15th century was purchased by the National Library and reveals for the first time the main trade routes of the Silk Road, which stretched from the Far East to Europe. The collection, dubbed the Second Afghan Genizah, was found several years ago in caves in the city of Bamyan in central Afghanistan. The find is considered an ancient and rare treasure from which scholars can learn much about life in ancient Jewish and Muslim communities in Persia and Afghanistan before the Mongol conquest.

Most of the texts were written by Jewish and Muslim merchants who lived in the period preceding the destruction the Mongol armies wreaked from 1258-1260, when they were led by the grandson of Genghis Khan.

Read article here at Ynet News

Who Really Wrote the Book of Job?

Who Really Wrote the Book of Job? - Jewish World - Haaretz - Israel News Haaretz.com

The Book of Job is quite possibly the strangest book in the Hebrew Bible, and is notoriously difficult to date.

In essence, Job is an essay on the problem of evil. The book starts with God and Satan discussing Job, a “perfect and upright” man who “feared God and eschewed evil” (1:1). Satan tells God that Job is only virtuous because he is well off; were he to suffer, he would surely “curse thee to thy face” (1:11). God accepts the challenge and gives Satan permission to destroy Job’s life.

Since the story lacks any historical context and no historic individuals are mentioned, it is very hard to date.

There's a snag, though. The language in Job is unlike any other found in the Bible, or outside it. True, the book is written in Hebrew, but it is very strange Hebrew indeed. It has more unique words than any other book of the Hebrew Bible. The language is archaic, which would indicate that it was very ancient: but it is also heavily influenced by Aramaic, which would make it relatively late.

Read more: Haaretz News

A mysterious medieval text decrypted

A mysterious medieval text, decrypted - The Boston Globe

AROUND THE YEAR 1290, a set of mysterious writings began to circulate in the Jewish community of Castile, an area in what is now modern-day Spain. Written in a lyrical, abstruse Aramaic, they were disseminated by a man named Moses ben Shem-Tov de León, a member of the region’s circle of Jewish mystics. De León claimed that the work was not his own — that he had copied an ancient manuscript in his possession, which had been composed in Palestine in the second century by the legendary sage Rabbi Shim’on bar Yohai. These writings had remained secret for centuries, de León claimed, and were only now being revealed to the world at large.

After decades of work, Matt has left a permanent mark on the world library of mystical literature, and the Zohar has left a permanent mark on him. “The Zohar forces you to look into yourself,” he told me, describing the effect of translating day in and day out, for years on end. “In trying to decipher what the text means, you’re actually engaged in an inner spiritual search.” Through that search, the “new-ancient” teachings of the Zohar have been renewed yet again.

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