All Episodes
Displaying 1 - 20 of 132 in total
Bidding Wars: Inside the History of Selling Shul Honors
In this class, we’ll trace how the sale of mitzvos in shul began, why it caught on, and how it spread across the Jewish world. We’ll look at halachic debates about sel...
We’ve Been Singing It All Wrong? Solving the V'chol Maaminim Mystery
Ever feel like some piyutim just don’t flow right, as if the stanzas are out of order? Join us for a historical detective journey as we trace the piyut V'chol Maaminim...
The Saga of Shul Shmoozing: A Historical Look at Talking in Shul Across the Centuries
Jews have been talking in shul for centuries, and rabbis and communities have tried countless ways to stop it. From twelfth-century Cairo to the Lower East Side in the...
The Cantonist Crisis
In 1827, Czar Nicholas I decreed that Jewish boys and young men be conscripted into the Russian army, a policy that shook Jewish life in Russia to its core. Communitie...
The Four Halls That Never Were: A Critical Look at Yosifun’s Design of the Beis Hamikdash
In this class, we will delve into the architectural anomaly of the “four halls” described in Yosifun’s account of the Beis HaMikdash. This description contradicts the ...
The Draft Dilemma: The Chilling Reality of Jews Deciding Who Gets Drafted
What do you do when the government demands soldiers and says you have to choose who goes? That’s exactly what Jewish communities in the late 1700s faced when the Austr...
The Dilemma of Handing Over One to Save Many
Can a Jewish community surrender one of its own to save the many? This class explores three cases from the 1600s and 1700s, where this wrenching question was brought b...
The Rabbi Who Couldn’t Quit Gambling
Today, we’ll examine the debate in Venice in 1630 over a communal ban against gambling. Local leaders moved to outlaw games of chance, but Rabbi Yehuda Aryeh Modena pu...
Up High or Down Low? The Battle Over the Proper Trop for the Aseres Hadibros
In 1725, Rabbi Zalman Hena published Shaarei Tefilah and sparked controversy by calling for a complete stop to the use of taam ha’elyon—the unique system of trop tradi...
The Great Semicha Controversy, Part II
Today, we’re picking up where we left off in the story of chidush hasemicha. We’ll look at what unfolded after Rabbi Levi ibn Chabib pushed back against Rabbi Yaakov B...
The Great Semicha Controversy, 1538
After the Spanish Expulsion, a group of leading rabbis in Tzfas, led by Rabbi Yaakov Beirav, set out to revive semichah—the original form of judicial ordination that l...
The Doctored Talmud: Prague, 1728
There’s a long and painful history of the Gemara being censored in Christian lands, but in 1728, a draconian form of censorship led to the publication of a heavily red...
The Marranos’ Secret Pesach
Sometime in the mid-1400s, Rabbi Shlomo Duran of Algiers penned a remarkable teshuvah directed at a group of conversos in Spain. These individuals, who had been forced...
The Machine Matzah Controversy
In the 1850s, a groundbreaking innovation was introduced in Galicia: machines to facilitate matzah production. What followed was a fierce and dramatic conflict that sh...
The Story of the Alter Rebbe’s Script
The Alter Rebbe’s unique script for safrus has a rich and winding history. It has been inked, shelved, revived, and debated—and everyone seems to have an opinion. So, ...
Rambam, the Almohads, and the Secret Jews
In the mid-12th century, the Almohads swept across North Africa and Spain, driven by a vision of a strictly unified Muslim society. For the Jewish communities under th...
Rambam to the Rescue: His Legendary Letter to Yemen
In the 1170s, the Jewish community in Yemen faced an existential crisis: a radical ruler forced them to convert to Islam, an apostate Jew spread anti-Jewish propaganda...
The Regensburg Blood Libel
In the 1470s, a series of outrageous blood libels were leveled against Jewish communities in the Germanic lands, including one in Regensburg. To secure their acquittal...
The Scandalous Marriage, 1348
On the fifteenth of Shevat, 1348, in the city of Tudela, a man named Yosef performed kidushin with a young woman named Belita. What began as a seemingly ordinary weddi...
Taxes and Tensions: The Story of Jewish Tax Disputes in Medieval Spain
Rabbi Shlomo ben Aderes, the legendary rabbi and leader of Barcelona, received countless questions during his tenure, many of which have been preserved to this day. In...
