Andrew had a heart of the most immense kindness and generosity and an intellect that was, in the true sense of the word, awe-inspiring. I was very privileged to know him.

May his dear soul rest in peace.
Andrew C. West, 1960-2025.

That's a fair point - yes, I do pay, so I don't see ads on X at all.

Each to his own, but to me the vibe at Bluesky is humorless, insufferably smug and dull, dull, dull. I've no intention of ever posting new content here, I vastly prefer the rough and tumble of X. This is, and will remain, just a placeholder/backup account.

In 1553, the population of Safed consisted of 1121 Muslim households, and 716 Jewish households, which rose to 945 households in 1567. There were more than 30 synagogues and 7000 Jews in Safed in 1576 when Murad III issued an edict for the forced deportation of 1000 Jewish families to Cyprus.

Jews have been a settled, permanent, continuous presence in the Holy Land for over three millennia, and have only ever left in numbers when exiled or forced out.

This collection has been formed quite regardless of expense - some of these tchotchkes cost literally fives of euros.

The vowels in this manuscript seem to be written in at a later date, and use a distinctly Polish Yiddish pronunciation. Many words are voweled in a Yiddish distortion of the Hebrew word, such as the word Ashpeh - in modern Hebrew it would be pronounced Ashpah, etc. 7/

There is debate as to when the pogroms associated with the Khmelnytsky Uprisings ended. The pogroms started in 1648, some historians put their end at 1654, but the pogrom described in this manuscript indicates otherwise. The general consensus today puts the end of these pogroms at 1657. 6/

"Fathers and children together were slaughtered next to each other. They slaughtered them and shed their blood, like the blood of rams and oxen.... The pillar of our world, Rabbi Judah, who had been a leader in the region for many years – they severed his head with an axe." 5/

"Rabbi Israel who was from the tribe of the Leviites, the enemies placed fire and sulphur on the heart, and his soul exited as he said the verse Shema Yisrael."
"...Rabbi Mordechai, who wrote the Holy Sefer Torah on parchments, and from them the enemies made sandals". 4/

Written in the form of a lamentation, it describes the pogrom starting on the 2nd day of Pesach in 1655 throughout the cities of Poland. "Rabbi Yitzchak the head of the Beth Din, who was an expert in the Torah, they injured his head, ripped his beard & threw him from the windows into the trash." 3/

The manuscript is undated, but the text has the character of a first-hand account, clearly written by someone who witnessed the pogrom himself, and likely dates from before 1700, thus predating the book itself by more than a century. The Hebrew vowelization was apparently added at a later period. 2/

No, I meant Jews, adherents of Judaism. When this developed in identifiable form is disputed, many academic historians say from the 8th or 9th century BCE, the Jewish view is it's much earlier than that. Samaritanism was also, separately, present but primarily confined to Samaria in central Israel.

This manuscript was formerly in the library of perhaps the greatest of all Jewish bibliophiles, David Solomon Sassoon. 6/