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Oxford Jewish Review

Thoughts on the Torah by Oxford Theoretical Physicist Prof. Douglas Abraham

The Torah reading of the portion of Lech Lecha in Genesis begins with Abraham leaving Ur Kasdim and venturing into the desert. During this time, he made a profound discovery by observing the heavens; this is described by Adolf Jellinek (1821-1893) in his collection: Beit Ha-Midrash (1853-1878, 6 volumes): 

When Abraham was young, he sought to serve the Highest. When the sun sank, and the stars came forth, he said: “These are the gods!” But the dawn came and the stars could be seen no longer, and then he said, “I will not worship these, since they are no gods.” Thereupon the sun came forth, and he spoke, “This is my god, him I will extoll”. But then the sun set, and he said, “He is no god&rdquo… Read More »

Pauline Malkiel 'Hebrew Printing in Venice in the 16th Century & the Valmadonna Trust Library'

A few words about how the Library began.  Mr. Lunzer’s wife came from Italy, with family connections to a village in Piedmont by the name of Valmadonna.  His interest in the Jews of Italy – which he visited many times – was aroused by passing through little places like Ferrara, Ancona, Fano, Sabbionetta, Pesaro, Rimini and Cremona, and reading about the wanderings of the Soncino family of printers.  His wife’s father had started a small collection of Italian books, and Mr. Lunzer, a diamond merchant, took over the custodianship of these books, which had been hidden away in a cellar during the War.  Gradually collecting Italian books became a priority, together with books printed in Amsterdam, whic… Read More »

Professor John Lennox 'Science & G-d'

When talking about science and religion seriously there is no conflict but more than this the difficulty is not the coexistence of science and religion but science coexisting with atheism. The fact that there is no necessary conflict between science and belief in G-d ought to be obvious, as Peter Higgs may have been an atheist but William Phillips believes in G-d and they both won the Nobel Prize in physics. In fact, over 60% percent were believers in G-d. There is no essential conflict between science and belief in G-d but rather the conflict lies between science and atheism. The case is however being made by Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking. Hawking writes in his most recent book The Grand Design with Leonard Mlodinow, “he has no… Read More »

Dr. Yoram Hazony "Sir Isaiah Berlin'

I am very grateful to Rabbi and Rebetzin Brackman for all the work that has made it possible for me to be here. It is humbling to come here to oxford and stand in a place where Isaiah Berlin once stood and be tasked with sharing my own thought about Isaiah Berlin and his legacy and adopting it to us, which is our goal this evening to think about the place of the Jew in contemporary philosophy and theology.

Let me begin this challenge by saying that if our question and the subject is the place of the Jew in contemporary philosophy and theology, then there is no better place to began than here at Oxford with Isaiah Berlin. In many ways we can think of his career that began in Oxford in the 1930s and didn’t end until the 1990s, a span o… Read More »

Holocaust Survivor Ivor Perl

Seventy years ago to this day there was a young boy - I was standing next to an electric fence at the end of January crying in my heart praying to G-d let me get out of this hell because it is my Bar Mitzvah. I was born in southern Hungary, a family of eleven, from a Chassidic family, and only my brother and I survived. We had a fairly happy childhood and normal life, despite anti-Semitism was a norm in Eastern Europe in the 1930s. My day started at 5 in the morning, learned Hebrew studies, had lunch and then resumed studying. That was my life until March 1944. In 4 months, until July, Hungary found the infrastructure for 400,000 Jews to be sent to their death. It was when Admiral Horthy tried to make peace with the allies, the Germans inva… Read More »

Chief Rabbi of Russia Berel Lazar with Introduction by Nathaniel Rothschild & Prof. Robert Service

Professor Robert Service - Introduction

It is a great pleasure to have been invited to help to introduce Chief Rabbi of Russia Rabbi Berel Lazar. It is impossible to understand the history of Russia, the USSR and Russia again, without understanding the relation between Russians and Jews, Russians and Ukrainians and Ukrainians and Jews. It was complex and tormented. For most of the 20th century it was extremely tormented. 

Often we think of the years of the 1930’s as being the nadir of Jewish religious life, Christian religious life, Muslim religious life and all religious life. But in fact, one of the greatest persecutors of religious faith in the USSR was the successor to Stalin, namely Nikita Khrushchev.

In other words, the … Read More »

Professor David Deutsch 'The fabric of reality’

‘The fabric of reality’ is a world view and my contention is that it should be the basic world view that is implied by our best ideas at present. Not that it’s not going to be improved upon, but it’s my opinion that our best ideas currently aren’t taken seriously enough, and The Fabric of Reality, the title of my first book, is my name for what you get when you do take them seriously.

It starts with the fact that we are human beings and therefore we are fallible: we make mistakes.

The first thing I ever published contained quite a big mistake. It was a review of a book called Advice to a Young Scientist by the biologist Peter Medawar, which I wrote for the Wolfson College magazine when I was a graduate studen… Read More »

Professor Brian Leftow 'Arguments proving the existence of G‑d'

Atheism is all the rage.  It sells lots of books, and they are angry books.  It is also close to being the majority creed of the UK.  A recent survey has it that 28% of Brits believe in a personal God.  Another 26% believe in "something," but do not know what (no mean feat). (Maybe it's a toaster.) By contrast, 26% believe in UFOs.  42% think religion is harmful, and I think it's a safe bet almost all of those are atheists. The new sort of atheist is aggressive.  They would like to convert you.  One move they all tend to make is to challenge you to prove God's existence, and claim that you're irrational or stupid to believe in God if you can't provide an argument that does so to their satisfactio… Read More »

Prof. Sir Michael Howard 'Reflections on the Holocaust'

First, where I am coming from. I am, as I realised rather late in life, a Jew of the blood. My mother’s Jewish parents came over from Germany and settled in England in the 1880s. They were not ‘observant’; and like most of their contemporaries in that diaspora, they did their best to assimilate to their host society. They gave my mother an upper-class English education; she did the same for me and my siblings; and as a result I have never felt anything but totally British. I only became conscious of my Jewish connections when a sad procession of my mother’s relations sought refuge in England in the 1930s. It did not strike home to me how closely involved I was with their tragic circumstances until I visited Ausc… Read More »

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz Q & A with Oxford students

Student: What are the current challenges facing science, and what are the common points, where Torah and science converge?

Rabbi Steinsaltz: The challenges facing science is in biology, which is currently the cutting edge of science. One simple thing that can happen over the next decade is the development of a brain-computer link, which may revolutionise our existence, far more than what has been done before. Imagine having unlimited memory with accessibility to everything. This would present a profound change and it is frightening to think that we are not that far from it.

The novelty that the Torah represents is the ability for a person to say ‘no’ and challenge certain areas of scientific development, which goes contrary to… Read More »

Professor Irwin Cotler

Sixty years on from the Holocaust, the most systematic and sophisticated genocide in human history, we are forced to encounter the ultimate question: has humanity advanced and learnt its lessons from the past? Can genocide reoccur in front of the eyes of the world?

This was the subject of a lecture given by renowned expert on human rights, former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, the Honourable Professor Irwin Cotler MP for the Oxford University Chabad Society.

Professor Irwin Cotler, who is at the forefront of a campaign to prosecute Iran's President Ahmedinejad for incitement to genocide, travelled from Canada to give the Chabad Society's annual Pearl Grunzweig memorial lecture. To give added flavour to the event,… Read More »

Ambassador Yehuda Avner

 

Before I delve into that I would like to tell you how refreshing it is to be just one of two speakers at tonight's grand occasion. I say this because just a few weeks ago I was invited to address a Jewish dinner in London, and I was the fourteenth speaker. When the evening began there were perhaps three hundred people in the hall, but as speaker after speaker droned on and on the hall gradually began to empty, so that by the time the eighth speaker went to the microphone there must have been about seventy people left. By the twelfth speaker we were down to twenty. And when I rose to speak — which was well after midnight — there were precisely two people left. But I made my speech. And when I finished I stepped down and a… Read More »

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz 'The Paganization of Western Culture'

Many years ago, Sir Isaiah Berlin and I started a correspondence that had to do with his ancestry.  In Jewish terms, he came from a very distinguished ancestry.  He was a direct descendant of the founder of the Chabad movement.  In the course of the years, I had the honor and the joy of meeting Sir Isaiah several times, both in England and in Jerusalem.  Isaiah Berlin was one of the last intellectuals in England.  An intellectual is not necessarily a university professor: he can also be a shoemaker.  An intellectual is a person of boundless curiosity, who has the desire and the ability to discuss everything, and the spark that can make something new out of anything.  There are very few people of this kind … Read More »

Stephen Ross 'T.S. Eliot and Anti-Semitism'

Passages from Poems, 1920:

from “Gerontion”:

My house is a decayed house

And the Jew squats in the window-sill, the owner,

Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,

Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.

The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;

Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.

The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,

Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.

I am an old man,

A dull head among windy spaces.

from “Burbank with a Baedeker; Bleistein with a Cigar”:

But this or such was Bleistein’s way:

A saggy bending of the knees

And elbows, with the palms turned out,

Chicago Semite Viennese.

 

A lustreless protrusive eye

Stares from the protozoic slime

At a perspe… Read More »

Dr. Brian Klug 'The concept of Anti-Semitism'

I wish my talk today could be light-hearted, but the subject we are discussing is no laughing matter.

Which reminds me of a Jewish joke. That’s not quite as paradoxical as it sounds, when you remember that irony, and especially self-mockery, is a staple of Jewish humour. Why, I’m not sure. But I know it’s true, not just because I grew up in a Jewish household but because Freud says so; and he took humour very seriously. In his 1905 treatise Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious he said this about the Jews: “I do not know whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of its own character.”

Be that as it may, the joke of which I am reminded is about Moishe the pedlar. Mois… Read More »

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