by Marc Michael Epstein, ed.

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A magnificent overview of the remarkable surviving evidence of the medieval Jewish book world. Though almost everything has been lost, what remains is extraordinary.

Of particular interest are the strategies the illuminators adopted to distinguish Jewish figures from non-Jewish figures. On surviving Haggadah, for example, appears to depict Jews as griffins. Another fascinating strategy was to appropriate a conventional Christian scene and to use its conventions to critique Christianity. For example, one illustration of Moses and family returning to Egypt (Exodus 4:20) looks almost exactly like the usual “Flight Into Egypt”. But there are details: two kids, not one! Zipporah is no virgin! And where we expect aged, infirm, broken-speared Joseph, we have young, virile, powerful Moses ready to confront Pharaoh. Clever. Maybe doubly clever; in some cases, we know that these paintings were done by Christian artists working from instructions in Latin that can still be discerned in the margins.

What I did not find enough of is details on production, especially details on how scribal errors were avoided. That’s why I spent the day in the Fine Arts Library! It was fascinating nonetheless .

by Ariel Sabar

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Prof. Karen King, from Harvard, presented a paper in the Vatican about a new papyrus fragment recently surfaced by an American collector. The small scrap included a fascinating reference by Jesus to his wife, and appeared to say that she was worthy to be a disciple. King, an authority on gnosticism, was inclined to believe it an authentic early account of the life of Jesus, a gospel.

It turned out to be a fraud. Sabar eventually tracks down the con man who created the forgery, and this makes a terrific and surprising detective story. The final chapters try to indict King and Harvard for gullibility, and these are far less convincing. Forgeries happen all the time, and people—even experts—are taken in by them all the time. If they weren’t convincing, they wouldn’t be interesting. Sabar is particularly blind in thinking that a divinity school professor would understand that the sort of sleuthing he undertook is possible: three separate trips to Germany on the trail of the con man’s East German background, extensive public records searches in numerous states, treks through school archives from Berlin to Florida, handwriting experts, archival searches for traces of the porn sites that the con man set up and to which the forgery was a side hustle.

Sabar also persists in misunderstanding King’s argument that the fragment, even though forged, can focus our attention on an underlying truth. We have very little evidence of Jesus’ views on sexuality or on the status of women. What evidence we do possess is chiefly in the letters of a man who disliked sex and who thought that family life was perfectly pointless because the world was going to end in the next year or two. Several of the letters in which Paul discusses this were forgeries.

by Sara J. Charles

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A pleasant and lively overview of what we know about medieval book production. It appears there weren’t many scriptoria; a lot of book production seems to have been done in cloisters or just wherever the copying could put a stool and a desk. I particularly enjoyed its treatments of different styles of writing, from Insular through Gothic. A good deal of this book focuses on evoking what book creators saw and felt. This is necessarily speculative, and I suspect it works better in lectures than on the page.

I once read a note by Alexander Lobrano, who can write, about the fact that the corect bistro accompaniment for duck confit, which was to be tonight’s dinner, was pommes salardaises, which is to say fried potato disk with garlic. I’ve tried this a few time, and have never been impressed. Returning home tonight, I thought I’d google for a better recipe.

On impulse, I asked claude.ai, and it gave me the recipe I expected, but with thicker potato slices. I asked, “Are you sure about the thickness of the potato slices?” It was confident. And it turned out well.

This is a nice example of using AI in a way where you’ll catch fabrication right away, and even if you miss, the damage is limited.

A good short series, adapted from Stephanie Dancer’s marvelous novel — the best novel about front-of-the-house restaurant life I know.

One who studies the career of forgery in the West may well wonder if the human mind nourishes a deep-seated desire to be taken in as grandly and as thoroughly as possible. Muntus fuld tezibi — ‘the world wants to be fooled’ — is after all the motto on the title page of one of the greatest of all exposés of scholars’ propensity to be fooled, J. B. Menke’s orations On the Charlatanry of the Learned” – Anthony Grafton, Forgery and Critics, Princeton University Press

I wondered what language Muntus fuld tezibi might be. It sounds like something John Dee might have mentioned in a spell book! But the answer is simple enough: the actual frontispiece says “Mundus vult decipi”, which is perfectly good Latin. I had my doubts at first, but Claude explains plausibly that decipi is the passive infinitive of “decipio, decipere, decepi, deceptus”. I don’t think Latin III got that far.

But fuld tezibi?

In the ACM Digital Library.

Ruhlman mentioned in his newsletter that Ratatouille remains the most accurate picture of a fine-dining kitchen. Having a 15-hour flight, I watched it again. It’s great.

The subtext of the film is a family debate among the rats. The kids are interested in people; in particular, one of the boys is fascinated by cooking. The father warns them that people simple cannot be trusted: that unfortunate and unfair, but that is also the way the world is.

When I saw this in 2007, I thought this was just generational conflict. But it’s not: the rats are meant to be read as Jews, the hero, young Remy, is a Jew Out Of Water, and his father’s warning is simply that you will never belong. When Father relents, it is only because Remy has no choice; if he is to cook, he must live among the gentiles and, while that is terribly dangerous, Father understands in the end that Remy has no choice.

Now that overt anti-semitism is once more part of mainstream-ish politics, it’s obvious.