On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
If you have any questions, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
The Cathedral of Our Lady of Almudena, in Madrid, preserves the legacy of the priest and scholar José Fernández Montaña (1842-1936). Part of this legacy is a synagogue scroll, which only came to light in the spring of 2010. This is a scroll of the Book of Esther, written in Hebrew and beautifully illuminated, which could date from around the end of the 16th or the first half of the 17th centuries CE. A peculiarity of this scroll is the signs (like the circellus masoreticus followed by two dots in a horizontal line), unique in the whole manuscript, that are found over four consonants, located in four words in a row. These supralinear markings must be related to one of the characteristics of the Book of Esther itself which distinguishes it from the rest of the books of the Hebrew Bible: it does not contain the divine name. Some commentators, especially starting in the Middle Ages, looked for hidden references to the divine name in this book. That tradition has been preserved in the Megillat Esther of Madrid Cathedral.
