Introduction to net.religion.jewish

Net.religion.jewish should not be mistaken for Judaism, for Jewish religious life on the early internet, or even for the full conversation that once passed through the Usenet group of that name. This Good Works shelf is a curated selection of fifty-two public texts, about sixty-five thousand words without this introduction, drawn from a 3,038-message mbox preserved in the Internet Archive's usenet-net collection. The raw group runs chiefly through 1984 and 1985, with smaller traces in 1983 and 1986. The public shelf is narrower than the raw archive, and that narrowness is the beginning of honest reading.

The shelf is strongest where it preserves a particular form of Jewish intellectual life: learned Jews, many of them Orthodox and many of them attached to universities, Bell Labs, AT&T, NYU, the Technion, medical schools, and research computing sites, using a young computer network to circulate Torah commentary, halakhic reasoning, practical questions, and Jewish memory. It is not a representative portrait of world Jewry. It is not Sephardi life, Mizrahi life, Hasidic life, Reform or Conservative congregational life, Israeli religious life, Soviet Jewish activism, Jewish feminism, Holocaust memory, or Jewish studies as a university field in any complete sense. It is a public-network room where a small group of technically connected writers made Jewish text and argument travel through UUCP relays.

The old introduction to this shelf called net.religion.jewish "the first regularly distributed electronic forum for Jewish religious discussion in history." That may feel plausible, but the library cannot keep it as a fact. Earlier electronic mailing lists, institutional message systems, local bulletin boards, and private academic networks are difficult to rule out. What can be said with confidence is smaller and more valuable: this is an unusually early surviving public distributed archive of Jewish religious discussion, and the shelf preserves one of the earliest known attempts to make weekly Torah learning, halakhic inquiry, Jewish polemic, and Jewish communal self-examination available to a networked public.

The Group And The Renaming

The name places the group in the old Usenet order. Before the Great Renaming of 1986-1987, the worldwide hierarchies were not the later familiar comp, sci, rec, soc, talk, news, and misc structure. The older scheme included net.* for unmoderated groups, mod.* for moderated groups, and fa.* for material gatewayed from ARPANET mailing lists. By 1986 that scheme had become difficult to administer. Transmission was expensive, backbone sites had real power because they paid real costs, and controversial or high-volume groups became political problems as well as technical ones.

The fate of net.religion.jewish is one of the revealing small stories of that reorganization. Some religious and flame-heavy material was being pushed toward talk.*, a hierarchy that could be more easily excluded by sites that did not want to carry controversial discussion. But Jewish discussion did not become talk.religion.jewish. It moved into soc.culture.jewish, a placement that acknowledged Jewishness as culture, peoplehood, history, and social life as well as religion. That shift matters. The old net.religion.jewish address framed Judaism as a religion subgroup. The later soc.culture.jewish address better fit the actual range of the conversation: Torah, halakhah, Israel, antisemitism, Jewish identity, language, jokes, foodways, denominations, conversion, politics, and memory all belonged to the same public room.

The raw mbox confirms the breadth. Of 3,038 messages, roughly 2,315 list net.religion.jewish alone as their newsgroup; many others are cross-posted to net.politics, net.religion, net.religion.christian, net.nlang.*, net.comics, net.jokes, and other rooms. The largest subject clusters are not quiet Torah essays. They include Middle East politics, terrorism, apartheid comparisons, Zionism and antisemitism, Soviet Jews, "Who is a Jew," Halloween and Jews, right-to-left writing, sexuality and halakhah, software, and arguments about inappropriate debating tactics. The public Good Works shelf chooses a different center from that raw traffic. It selects Torah commentary, practice, history, folklore, and a few self-critical boundary texts, while leaving most flame, politics, and repetitive dispute outside the reader's path.

That is an editorial choice, not a neutral mirror. It makes the shelf more readable and more useful as a religious-text archive, but it also means the shelf must not be cited as if it represents ordinary traffic in the group.

The D'var Torah Project

The heart of the shelf is the d'var Torah series. More than thirty of the fifty-two texts are Torah commentaries keyed to the weekly parashah or Jewish calendar. They are not sermons in the modern American synagogue sense, though some are sermon-like. They are miniature exercises in inherited reading: a verse is noticed, a difficulty is raised, Rashi or Midrash or Talmud or Zohar or a later commentator is brought to bear, and the whole motion turns toward a practical or theological teaching.

This is why the shelf matters. The internet did not invent Jewish textuality. It did not invent the weekly cycle, the parashah, the midrashic question, the halakhic aside, the Purim parody, the chain of named authorities, or the habit of arguing as a form of fidelity. What it did here was give old forms a new surface. A D'var Torah that might have been spoken at a table, printed in a synagogue bulletin, taught in a yeshiva hallway, or mailed to a few friends could now appear as public network traffic, addressed to strangers who knew enough to answer.

Avi Feldblum is central to that development in this shelf. In the Vayak'hel-Pekudei commentary, he explains that his own site could read but not post, so his essays were relayed by friends. He asks readers not to reply to the relay address and gives a UUCP path through allegra and ihnp4 to reach him. That practical note is as historically important as the commentary itself. It shows a Torah project being built inside the constraints of early networking: not a polished publication platform, but a fragile chain of machines, favors, paths, and trust.

Feldblum's parashah essays are dense with the habits of Orthodox learning. Parshat Zachor treats Amalek not as a generic enemy myth but as a problem in divine kingship, memory, and communal obligation. Vayak'hel-Pekudei asks why Shabbos interrupts the command to build the Mishkan and answers through a theology of three kinds of holiness: holiness in time, holiness in persons, and holiness in space or object. Re'e moves from Elul and shofar to the Sifre's parable of two roads, then closes with halakhic notes on Hadash and the divine name. Bechukotai links collective accountability and free will to the 1985 controversy over President Ronald Reagan's visit to the Bitburg military cemetery, where Waffen-SS graves made memory, guilt, and public honor inseparable.

The other d'var Torah writers widen the texture. Dovid Chechik, writing from AT&T Information Systems, works through the Bais Halevi, the Zohar, Targum, and Midrash with a taste for tightly wound conceptual problems: why Israel said "we will do and we will hear"; why Moshe prayed for Yehoshua among the spies; why the golden calf involved not only idolatry but failure to stop others. Pinchus Klahr, posting from NYU, brings Sefas Emes, Meshech Chochma, Hirsch, the Dubna Maggid, and halakhic-calendar material into the same public stream. Ephraim Silverberg, writing from the Technion, brings Chabad and Likkutei Sichot into essays on Nadav and Avihu, Korach, and Jacob's ladder. Asher Schechter and Asher Meth bring NYU voices into Passover, conversion, kavanah, and Jewish identity. Ari Gross, Baruch Sterman, Azriel Heuman, Michael Schneider, Eliyahu Teitz, and others make the series less a single-author archive than a small distributed beit midrash.

The phrase "beit midrash" should be used carefully. The group was not a study hall in the embodied sense. No shared table, no smell of paper, no teacher watching faces, no full social life of learning surrounded these posts. But the shelf does preserve a recognizable beit-midrash habit: speech by citation, difficulty as doorway, authority named rather than hidden, disagreement as continuity rather than rupture.

Halakhah Meets The Computer

The shelf is also valuable because several texts bring halakhic reasoning into direct contact with computer-age questions. The most striking is Holy Names on Disk, a ruling transmitted by Dave Sherman from Rabbi David Schochet of Toronto on whether divine names stored in computer memory or on disk are subject to the prohibition against erasure. This is exactly the kind of question that makes responsa literature historically precious. Jewish law is not only a system of inherited rules; it is a discipline for asking what older categories mean when the material world changes.

Britannica's account of responsa notes that rabbinic replies to questions of Jewish law became a distinctive literature after the redaction of the Talmud and often preserve the record of changing social and technological conditions. Holy Names on Disk belongs to that same long genre, but the medium and subject have folded into one another. A computer network carries a question about whether computer storage counts as writing. The archive is both the vehicle and part of the problem.

Stolen Software and Halakha extends the same pattern into intellectual property. Willis Johnson asks how Jewish law should evaluate software copying, using categories such as hasagat gevul, abandonment of hope, and dina d'malkhuta dina. The essay is not a modern copyright treatise, and readers should not take it as legal advice. Its importance is that it catches a religious legal mind in the middle of a new material problem. Software was becoming common enough to steal before the moral language around software had stabilized. Halakhah arrives not as an antique code but as a way of forcing the new object to answer old questions: What is theft? What counts as damage? What does civil law require? What kind of boundary can exist around an intangible work?

Other legal-practical texts treat rain-prayer in exile, chametz search before Passover, Yom Kippur and Kol Nidray, divine-name erasure, conversion, and the authority of the Oral Law. Their shared grammar is not "here is my opinion." It is: here is the inherited category, here is the relevant text, here is the difficulty, here is the range of acceptable reasoning. The shelf lets readers see how Jewish law becomes public network prose without ceasing to be Jewish law.

Orthodox Density And Its Limits

The shelf's dominant religious voice is Orthodox. That does not mean every writer is Orthodox, or that every text is halakhic, or that the raw group lacked non-Orthodox participants. It means the selected public shelf is thickest where writers assume the binding force of Torah, Oral Law, Talmud, rabbinic commentary, and mitzvot. Britannica's concise description of Orthodox Judaism is useful here: Written Law and Oral Law remain fixed norms of religious observance, with the Mishna and Talmud carrying the oral tradition. That assumption is not background in these posts. It is the engine.

Eliyahu Teitz's The Torah is Not in Heaven makes the principle explicit. The authority of the Oral Law is not treated as optional commentary laid on top of scripture, but as the condition under which Torah can be lived after Sinai. Torah and the Documentary Hypothesis, by A.Y. Feldblum, pushes in another direction: it answers modern higher criticism from within an Orthodox framework, arguing that the tradition's account of Torah transmission is not more methodologically naive than the reconstructions of modern biblical criticism. A reader need not accept the argument to understand the shelf. But the argument reveals the posture: modernity is not ignored, but it is answered from inside a world where Torah and rabbinic authority remain binding.

Kenneth Wolman's Where Are the Non-Orthodox (and Why) is therefore one of the shelf's crucial self-critical texts. Wolman, writing as a Conservative Jew, asks why Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, secular, and less observant Jews are mostly absent from the serious public conversation. His answer is not simple blame. He sees a structural problem: Orthodox communities invest in education, textual competence, press, institutions, and public argument; non-Orthodox Jews often criticize Orthodox dominance after having withdrawn from the infrastructures that make such dominance possible. The essay matters because it refuses the archive's implied self-sufficiency. It asks what kind of Judaism becomes visible when the people most trained to speak are the people who speak most often.

The question still matters. Pew's 2020 study of Jewish Americans shows a denominational field far broader than this shelf: Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Jews of no religion, smaller branches, multiple-stream identities, and uneven connections between branch identity and synagogue membership. That contemporary data cannot be projected backward onto a 1984-1986 Usenet group. But it helps modern readers avoid a common archival mistake: treating the loudest preserved textual community as the whole people.

Boundaries, Conversion, And Assimilation

Several selected texts ask who belongs, how belonging is preserved, and what is lost when Jewish identity becomes merely sentimental. These are not abstract questions in the shelf. They appear in arguments over conversion, intermarriage, non-Orthodox absence, Operation Magic Carpet, secular Judaism, and the distinction between Jewish peoplehood and Jewish religious obligation.

Asher Meth's A Letter to the Gentile Partner is severe. It shares a newspaper letter addressed to non-Jewish partners asked to undergo token conversion for the sake of Jewish in-laws. The argument is not missionary. It is a warning that a false conversion insults everyone involved: the non-Jewish partner, Judaism, the Jewish family, and the integrity of covenantal belonging. The text should be read as one Orthodox-inflected document in a much larger Jewish conversation about intermarriage and conversion, not as the library's voice. Its value is the clarity with which it exposes the emotional and theological stakes of a social compromise.

The Lost Souls of Magic Carpet turns from individual conversion to collective memory. Asher Meth reflects on Yemenite and Sephardi Jews brought to Israel under Operation Magic Carpet and on stories of religious coercion, shorn peiyot, Shabbat-violating labor requirements, and children separated from inherited practice. The historical subject is painful and contested in Israeli memory. The Jewish Virtual Library and the JDC Archives describe the airlift as a massive rescue and immigration operation that brought tens of thousands of Yemenite Jews to Israel. Meth's post preserves a different layer: the religious grief of those who believed rescue had been accompanied by secularizing violence. The reader should not flatten one into the other. Rescue, absorption, state-building, paternalism, coercion, and trauma can occupy the same historical field.

Gary Buchholz's Secular Judaism and the Search for the Supreme Fiction comes from a different angle. Prompted by Laurence Silberstein's work on Ahad Ha'am and secular Jewish identity, Buchholz asks whether Jewish categories can be translated into cultural-national terms after belief has weakened. His answer moves through sociology of religion, biblical criticism, Wallace Stevens, and the idea of a "supreme fiction" adequate to human existence. It is one of the shelf's least typical pieces, and for that reason one of its most important. It shows that the group could receive not only halakhic exposition but theological-philosophical experiment.

Fran Silbiger's B'nai Or account of Yom Kippur in a Jewish Renewal setting is another necessary counterweight. ALEPH's own history traces B'nai Or to Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who founded it in 1978 as a local Philadelphia Jewish Renewal congregation and national organization; it later became P'nai Or and then part of ALEPH. Silbiger's account names mixed seating, matriarchal language, masculine and feminine divine address, chant, intention, and an altered experience of High Holiday liturgy. In this shelf, where Orthodox text-learning dominates, the B'nai Or witness reminds readers that the 1980s Jewish internet also touched experimental liturgy, feminist language, Havurah/Renewal energies, and ecstatic community practice.

Karaites, Oral Law, And The Politics Of Authenticity

Yehoyaqim Shemtob Martillo's Karaite Jews essay is one of the shelf's strongest historical pieces, but it must be read critically. Karaism repudiates the rabbinic Oral Law and places authority in the Hebrew Bible; Britannica frames it as a movement set directly against Rabbinic Judaism, while its article on Anan ben David describes Anan as an eighth-century Persian Jew whose anti-rabbinical order contributed to the still-existing Karaite movement. Martillo writes from within a Rabbinic Jewish framework and is deeply interested in authenticity, schism, and boundary. His language about Karaites should not be treated as a neutral contemporary account of Karaite self-understanding.

The essay's enduring force lies in its final historical turn. Martillo describes the Nazi classification of Karaites as racially non-Jewish, tied to anti-Talmud polemic and to rabbinic scholars who, under catastrophic pressure, did not insist on Karaite Jewishness in a way that would doom Karaite lives. The episode is a brutal lesson in the danger of theological categories under racial states. A dispute about Oral Law becomes entangled with life and death. A group's marginality becomes a possible shield. Rabbinic denial, normally polemical, becomes rescue. No simple moral remains intact.

This is one of the places where the shelf's internal Orthodox-Rabbinic density becomes productive rather than merely limiting. The reader sees how much weight the Oral Law carries for the writers, and therefore why Karaism matters as more than a historical curiosity. It is a challenge to the very machinery by which most of the shelf reads Torah.

Folklore, Poetry, And Learned Play

The shelf is not only law and parashah. It also includes Jewish folklore, Hebrew poetry, parody scholarship, and memory.

Mark R. Leeper's The Golem in Literature opens the shelf toward Jewish folklore and modern reception. The golem legend, especially the Prague cycle attached to Rabbi Judah Loew, is one of the most mobile figures in Jewish and European imagination. YIVO's encyclopedia treats the golem as a literary and folkloristic tale, and the Jewish Museum Berlin notes the distance between the historical Rabbi Loew and the later magical role assigned to him. Leeper's essay is not a scholarly monograph, but it catches the golem as a figure already moving through Yiddish theater, horror, science fiction, and modern genre literature. For a folklore library, that movement matters: religious figures do not remain inside the sources that first shaped them.

Bill Peter's A Digression on Hebrew Poetry brings Yehuda HaLevy and the Andalusian Golden Age into the Usenet room. Its scale is modest, but its presence is important. A group dominated by halakhah and Torah commentary pauses to admire Hebrew poetic craft, wordplay, medieval Jewish culture, and translation. It reminds the reader that Jewish textual civilization is not reducible to law, even in a shelf where legal and exegetical forms dominate.

Raphael Finkel's Ritual Slaughter of the Latke is Purim Torah in academic comic dress. The Latke-Hamantash Debate, associated especially with the University of Chicago tradition begun in 1946, represents a form of Jewish learned absurdity: scholars apply disciplinary seriousness to a deliberately ridiculous holiday-food question. Finkel's essay, originally delivered at a Latke-Homentash Debate in Madison and posted to net.religion.jewish, belongs to that world. It is funny because it knows the rules. Purim Torah works by imitating the gravity of sacred argument closely enough that the parody becomes an act of affection.

Frederick Liss's Memories is quieter. It recalls Jewish life around the Grand Concourse in the Bronx: shoychetim, spice merchants, kosher butchers, shop signs, prayer, and commerce woven into neighborhood texture. In a shelf so full of argument, the memoir gives the reader social smell and street-level memory. It is not a demographic history of Bronx Jewry. It is one person's recollection, posted by a DEC engineer into a public computer network, of a Jewish commercial and spiritual world already dispersed.

What The Shelf Does Not Preserve

The absences are not secondary. The shelf does not give the reader Yiddish Usenet, Ladino Usenet, Hebrew-language Israeli network life, Soviet Jewish samizdat, Ethiopian Jewish memory, Mizrahi halakhic authority, women rabbis, queer Jewish religious voice, Reform liturgy, Conservative responsa, Reconstructionist theology, academic Jewish studies, or ordinary synagogue lay life in any balanced way. It contains women, non-Orthodox voices, Renewal testimony, secular theology, and memory, but they are not the center of gravity.

It also does not preserve the full argumentative temperature of the raw group. The mbox's largest subject clusters show that politics and controversy were constant: Israel, terrorism, antisemitism, apartheid comparisons, Soviet Jews, and "Who is a Jew" appear far more heavily in the raw traffic than in the public shelf. Good Works has chosen not to make the reader wade through every repetitive or hostile thread. That choice improves the shelf as a doorway into religious text, but it also means the reader should imagine a noisier room behind the door.

Finally, the shelf contains public posts by identifiable people from a smaller internet. Good Works preserves these texts because they were posted to a public distributed network and because they are historically and religiously valuable. Still, public does not mean ownerless. Do not treat old email paths as invitations. Do not collapse a poster's 1985 argument into a total portrait of the person. Do not make the early internet's informality into permission for carelessness.

How To Read This Shelf

Begin with the frame texts. Read Where Are the Non-Orthodox (and Why) early, because it teaches the archive's imbalance. Then read Parashat Vayak'hel-Pekudei -- Holiness of Time, People, and Place, because Feldblum's introductory note shows the d'var Torah project as both Torah and network logistics. Follow with Parashat Pesach, Parshat Zachor, Parshat Bechukotai, and D'var Torah -- Parshat Mishpatim to hear the Orthodox exegetical center.

Then turn to legal and technological pressure: Holy Names on Disk, Stolen Software and Halakha, On Praying for Rain in Exile, and The Torah is Not in Heaven. These show halakhah not as an abstract system but as a discipline for answering concrete change.

After that, widen the room. Read B'nai Or beside A Letter to the Gentile Partner and Secular Judaism and the Search for the Supreme Fiction. The three texts do not agree, and that is the point: Renewal liturgy, Orthodox conversion severity, and secular Jewish philosophical reconstruction all belong to the same archive only if the archive is honest about difference.

Read Karaite Jews with caution and attention to standpoint. Read The Golem in Literature, A Digression on Hebrew Poetry, Ritual Slaughter of the Latke, and Memories when the shelf begins to feel too legal or too inward. They restore folklore, poetry, comedy, and neighborhood life.

The best way through the shelf is not chronological. It is concentric. Start with the archive's self-knowledge, move into Torah commentary, test the legal edge, widen into boundary disputes, and then let folklore and memory remind you that Judaism is never only proposition, never only law, never only identity, never only text.

Sources Consulted

Colophon

This introduction was written for the Good Works Library in 2026 as a source-critical guide to the public net.religion.jewish shelf. The local shelf contains fifty-two selected Markdown texts plus this introduction. The raw comparison corpus used here is the Internet Archive net.religion.jewish.mbox.zip, extracted to a 3,038-message mbox. The public shelf should be cited as a curated Good Works selection from early Usenet Jewish discussion, not as a complete or representative transcript of the group.

← Back to index