October 11, 2007

James L. Archibald
11 October 2007

11 October started like any day, really. The big news was the MNE 349 “Jewish” test. No, it was not an attempt to see which of us are Jewish and which are still crypto-Mormons. It was, however, expected to be a challenging assessment of our knowledge of Jewish history through medieval times. Ophir Yarden (our instructor), true to the reputation of his alma mater (U Chicago), has no reservations about giving copious reading assignments written at a high level. The announced midterm's eventual arrival was met with significant trepidation on the part of the students.
The test was short, about two pages with 25 questions. Most of the questions were straighforward and Yarden was true to his word that he would not test “non-central” details. Question number nine was even removed from the test before Yarden made the copies while another question regarding the auto da fe of the Spanish Inquisition era was thrown out completely. It was determined that the credited response to the true/false question regarding whether or not Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai's Jewish opponents accepted Roman rule was both true and false. Yarden also proved very willing to give as much partial credit as possible without compromising the integrity of the testing process.
The other big news of the day for at least half of the students was that Hebrew class met twice that day. Hebrew class seems almost like one of those credit cards that offers a low introductory rate only to change the rates later. In this case, the introductory rate was about one class session per month. But, whether sooner or later, one always pays for such things. Now the cries of “join now, just one class per month” are a distant figment of our imaginations that could have been used to get us to join Hebrew class (when we signed up, we actually had no idea what the schedule would be, so the analogy is not perfect). Now, the Arabic-learning students rejoice as they are the ones able to cavort about the city while their classmates struggle through rudimentary phrases in a strange language.