Eugène Roger was a Franciscan missionary who spent time in the Holy Land between 1629 and 1634 and served as a physician to Druze leader and Ottoman governor Fakhr al-Din II (ca. 1572–1635). Roger wrote about his experiences in the Middle East in La terre saincte (The Holy Land), first published in France in 1646.
Every day, I ask all those that pass by the shepherd’s tents,
What is all this, why is all this?
Has my beloved had a change of heart, and abandoned his flock forever,
And rejected them, and…
This fringe from Kuntillet Ajrud, knotted from undyed linen threads, could be the fringe (tzitzit) that Israelites are commanded to wear on the corners of their garments, as indicated in Numbers 15:37…
Political modernity, by making the varied dimensions of existence automatic and, in particular, by separating the political from the religious, posed the problem of Jewish identity in a dramatic…