Teruah in 1552

The excellent Jewish history blog "On the Main Line" focuses on showcasing and contextualizing interesting historical Jewish texts. A Jewish children's primer from 1827? He's got it. Earliest known print source of the Golem of Prauge? That too. The post, though, that near and dear to my heart is his discussion of a "page from Libro de Oracyones, the Ladino siddur published in Ferrara 1552 by Yom Tob Athias (the Spaniard formerly known as Jeronimo de Vargas)."

Not only does this text have an early description of the shofar calls, but it's an information graphic! Note the way the different calls are drawn. Tekiah are long swoopy lines bracketing the other calls. Shevarim is three short strokes. (note how much they look the shin used to abbreviate them) and Teruah is short hyper-kinetic wiggle. In my day job I'm a research scientist with a deep love for information graphics and visual notation. This hits me where I live, folks. I need to make a Teruah blog graphic out of this. Love it. love it. loveit.

Check out the full post for a great linguistic exploration of the different ways in which Teruah is translated in Spanish.

Hat tip to my buddy Daniel for pointing me to the post. Thanks!