Joanna Weinberg

Johann Buxtorf (1564-1629) pursued the study of Hebrew and Aramaic and the writings and rituals of Jewish tradition through a long and productive life as a professor at the University of Basel and an impresario of Jewish texts. The focus of this work is on Buxtorf's scholarly practices -- for example, the ways in which he read and made excerpts from a wide variety of Jewish texts, recycled them in his polemical Juden schul (1603), a treatise on the customs and ceremonies of Ashkenazic Jews, and surveyed them in pioneering if incomplete bibliographies. Using a wide variety of unpublished sources, including letters to Buxtorf from Jewish print professionals, this study follows him into the Basel printing houses that produced books in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish, and reconstructs how he worked there as both an editor and a censor -- even rewriting certain Jewish prayers to eliminate anti-Christian sentiments. Buxtorf took a special interest in the textual history of the Hebrew Bible: he argued that the vowel points and accents had entered its text at a very early stage. This study shows that Buxtorf developed his views in dialogue -- and debate -- with both Jewish and Christian scholars. He often expressed contempt for both the Jews whose texts he read and those whom he occasionally met in Basel, Frankfurt, or elsewhere, yet his passion for Jewish literature of every kind never faltered.

Cooking for kids can be tricky but this book, packed with recipes that have been tried and tested by thousands of kids, is here to help. Feeding kids is a maze - one day they’ll eat a whole cucumber from one end to the other; for the next three weeks, they will swear it’s a slimy snozzcumber. Whether time or cash strapped, it’s all too tempting to turn to fish fingers, bangers and mash and other kids’ classics, whilst wishing it was easier to do it better on all fronts: more exciting, more inspiring, more wholesome. If only there was someone out there who knew how to feed kids really well on a budget, who could inspire them to try different food, and make it easy on the cook and easy on the pocket! Well, there is. And Chefs in Schools would like to help. Chefs in Schools is a charity that operates in over 80 schools and feeds up to 30,000 pupils a day. They have a plethora of renowned chefs that support and endorse them as their patrons or trustees, including Thomasina Miers, Yotam Ottolenghi, Henry Dimbleby, Prue Leith and Amelia Freer. This cookbook stands apart from other ‘cooking for kids’ cookbooks as the recipes are tried and tested on thousands of children. They’re nutritious and proven to work. This cookbook tells the stories and shares the recipes of the people who are helping to transform school food. Their mission is to teach children to love and understand real food cooked from fresh ingredients, and to inspire them not just to eat it, but to choose it, and to learn to cook it for themselves too. Chapters include: Breakfast, A New Way In, Midweek Suppers, Street Food & Snacks, Feasting, Sides & Sharing, Bread, Desserts." Bye bye boring school dinners - this is the future of food for our kids” - Tom Kerridge "A brilliantly inspiring book packed with seriously good family focussed recipes. A total must have." - Thomasina Miers

“[An] extraordinary book.” —New Republic Fusing high scholarship with high drama, Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg uncover a secret and extraordinary aspect of a legendary Renaissance scholar’s already celebrated achievement. The French Protestant Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) is known to us through his pedantic namesake in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. But in this book, the real Casaubon emerges as a genuine literary hero, an intrepid explorer in the world of books. With a flair for storytelling reminiscent of Umberto Eco, Grafton and Weinberg follow Casaubon as he unearths the lost continent of Hebrew learning—and adds this ancient lore to the well-known Renaissance revival of Latin and Greek. The mystery begins with Mark Pattison’s nineteenth-century biography of Casaubon. Here we encounter the Protestant Casaubon embroiled in intellectual quarrels with the Italian and Catholic orator Cesare Baronio. Setting out to understand the nature of this imbroglio, Grafton and Weinberg discover Casaubon’s knowledge of Hebrew. Close reading and sedulous inquiry were Casaubon’s tools in recapturing the lost learning of the ancients—and these are the tools that serve Grafton and Weinberg as they pore through pre-1600 books in Hebrew, and through Casaubon’s own manuscript notebooks. Their search takes them from Oxford to Cambridge, from Dublin to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as they reveal how the scholar discovered the learning of the Hebrews—and at what cost.