It's easier for me to brag about what I didn't buy at the SOY Seforim Sale. I could have spent hundreds of dollars there, but I figured that Blanca needs a chance at a college education, and, more immediately, enough space to sleep in our apartment. But I'll also list what I did come home with, along with an interesting tidbit from a few of them. Sociologically speaking, and surprisingly enough, I didn't
What I didn't buy (not because I didn't want to! Who is a hero? He who conquers his impulse!):
Hasidism on the Margin: Reconciliation, Antinomianism, & Messianism in Izbica & Radzin Hasidism, by Shaul Magid et al.;
פיוטי סליחות, a collection of out-of-print liturgical poetry edited by an all-star team of "those who wake the slumbering" (the traditional term for those who recover forgotten manuscripts), including Daniel Goldschmidt and Israel Ta-Shma;
כתר ירושלים, The Bible of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, According to the Text and Masorah of the Aleppo Codex and Related Manuscripts, Following the Methods of Rabbi Mordechai Breuer;
Happiness in Premodern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge, and Well-Being, by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson.
What I did buy:
God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God, by Alvin Plantinga. ("[B]elief in other minds and belief in God are in the same epistemiological boat; hence if either is rational, so is the other. But obviously the former is rational; so, therefore, is the latter.")
Magic and Folklore in Rabbinic Literature, by Daniel Sperber. ("[Describing a source in Tanhuma] [The] Biblical teraphim . . . were made of slaughtered first-born men, salted and oiled. Then certain magical formulae were engraved on a golden plate. The resultant image was then placed in a niche in the wall, candles were lit beside it; it would speak in oracular fashion, answering questions and no doubt foretelling the future.") I particularly look forward to his translation and treatment of Yerushalmi Berachot 1:1.
בעלי התוספות, The Tosaphotists: Their History, Writings, and Methods, by Ephraim Urbach (Expect me to wax even more Ashkenazic over the next weeks and months . . .)
The Limits of Orthodox Theology: Maimonides' Thirteen Principles Reappraised, by Marc Shapiro ("Some kabbalists taught that as a punishment for what Maimonides wrote in his philosophical writings he was condemned to be reincarnated as a worm.")
הלכה, מנהג ומציאות באשכנז 1000-1350, Ritual, Custom and Reality in Franco-Germany, 1000-1350, by Israel M. Tashma
(As for Agnon's A Simple Story, suffice it to say that my purchase thereof is not so simple. I've tried to buy it twice from D-book, an Israeli on-line firm, which I would have recommended once upon a time. Now I have to go buy it somewhere in person, which might take me a while. Just -- cough, cough -- go on without me, fellow Book Schnooks! Leave me by the side of the road! And do so with the help of Kobi Haron's Web page.)
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