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incunabula.bsky.social
Incunabula
@incunabula.bsky.social
2.2K followers 40 following 170 posts
This is a dormant account which I only very occasionally update, follow me on X at https://x.com/incunabula.
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incunabula.bsky.social
Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · Aug 17
The most monstrous dictator in Europe since Hitler, not just appeased, but fêted, honored, by President Trump, who is seemingly intent on giving Putin absolutely everything he wants, including Ukrainian land his barbaric forces have not yet even conquered. A shameful day.
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incunabula.bsky.social
Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · Jul 14
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.
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incunabula.bsky.social
Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · Jul 14
I've just heard the terrible news that my friend - and friend of many here - Andrew West, @babelstone.co.uk, the incomparably brilliant Sinologist and Tangutologist passed away suddenly but peacefully on 10th July. 1/2
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incunabula.bsky.social
Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · May 25
The official Harvard 2025 Yearbook:
“October 2023: War Breaks Out in Gaza.”
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incunabula.bsky.social
Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · Feb 9
"Never again"
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incunabula.bsky.social
Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · Feb 2
"This was not just a handover of an Israeli captive. It was a ritualistic humiliation. A Jew was hauled to a public square packed with men who hate her kind. She was made into a spectacle for the sport of radical Islamists. It was an outrage from another century."
www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-...
Why are 'anti-racists' silent about Arbel Yehud's terrible ordeal?
Watching Arbel Yehud being freed in Gaza today, I thought to myself: this is what it must have been like at Salem
www.spectator.co.uk
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incunabula.bsky.social
Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · Feb 2
"The West’s progressive dogma has deprived it of a theory of mind for savagery."
telegraph.co.uk/gift/fa907a1...
The so-called virtue of the West has blinded it to reality of Islamist cruelty
Even the suffering of Israeli hostages can’t wake progressives from their fantasyland morality
telegraph.co.uk
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incunabula.bsky.social
Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · Jan 19
ברוך אתה אדוני, אלוהינו מלך העולם, מתיר אסורים
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incunabula.bsky.social
Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · Nov 21
13 Jan. 1898 - Emile Zola addresses the President of France and accuses his government of antisemitism and the unlawful jailing of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Army officer sentenced to life imprisonment for espionage. Zola points out a litany of judicial errors and an utter lack of serious evidence.
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incunabula.bsky.social
Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · Nov 21
That's a fair point - yes, I do pay, so I don't see ads on X at all.
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incunabula.bsky.social
Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · Nov 21
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.
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Reposted by Incunabula
incunabula.bsky.social
Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · Oct 15
JEWISH PRINTING IN HEBREW, IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL IN 1578.

This is Rabbi Samuel Aripul's "Sar Shalom", printed in 1578 by Abraham & Eliezer Askkenazi at Safed (צְפַת Tsfat), the highest city in the Galilee, in what is today northern Israel.

Jews were printing books in Israel nearly 5 centuries ago.
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Reposted by Incunabula
incunabula.bsky.social
Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · Oct 15
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.
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Reposted by Incunabula
incunabula.bsky.social
Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · Oct 15
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.
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Reposted by Incunabula
petertarras.bsky.social
Peter Tarras @petertarras.bsky.social · Nov 15
This is the beginning of the oldest Arabic version of Christ's Letter Sent from Heaven. This 10th century ms. (Munich BSB Cod. arab. 1067) is one of the oldest witnesses of this apocryphon in existence. Digital images are available online here: www.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/view/bsb0....
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incunabula.bsky.social
Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · Nov 15
This collection has been formed quite regardless of expense - some of these tchotchkes cost literally fives of euros.
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incunabula.bsky.social
Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · Nov 10
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/
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incunabula.bsky.social
Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · Nov 10
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/
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incunabula.bsky.social
Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · Nov 10
"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/
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incunabula.bsky.social
Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · Nov 10
"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/
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incunabula.bsky.social
Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · Nov 10
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/
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incunabula.bsky.social
Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · Nov 10
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/
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incunabula.bsky.social
Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · Nov 10
A machzor (prayerbook), printed in Sulzbach in 1794, with a contemporary Hebrew manuscript account bound in of the Jews murdered in a Polish pogrom on the 2nd day of Pesach 1655, together with an additional later Yiddish translation written in pencil. 1/
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incunabula.bsky.social
Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · Oct 25
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.
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incunabula.bsky.social
Incunabula @incunabula.bsky.social · Oct 15
This manuscript was formerly in the library of perhaps the greatest of all Jewish bibliophiles, David Solomon Sassoon. 6/
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