Noted as news

Yehoshua Horowitz, a disciple of Victor Aptowitzer, died recently. Not sure when it happened, but the latest (Heshvan 5669) issue of Moriah has a posthumous article by him, on Mordechai Shevuot. Amazing how he was working on manuscripts until the very end. The thesis he wrote under Aptowizter's guidance in 1937 was looted by the Nazis, along with the other manuscripts at the Rabbinical Seminary in Vienna, and is now found in Warsaw (where the Communists left the manuscripts after taking them from the Nazis).

The amazing Yosef Avivi has published a massive, three volume work on Lurianic Kabbalah. Unlike most practioners of Kabbalah studies, Avivi's primary focus is bibliographic. The literary history of Kabbalat ha-Ari is extremely complex, and Avivi is practically the only person capable of making sense of it. But the third volume includes discussions of content as well as form.

And I just saw a new volume of Shalem, a journal for the study of the Land of Israel. It includes several articles of vital Talmudic interest. Neil Danzig publishes new fragments of Pirkoi ben Baboi's tract, and Simcha Emanuel discusses R. Yehiel of Paris and his connections to the Land of Israel.