French government proposes axing Revue des Études Juives, Revue de Qumran

Read all about it at Palaeojudaica. As Jim Davila writes:

I have just learned that the CNRS is considering cutting financial support to two critically important journals in Jewish studies: the Revue de Qumran and the Revue des Études Juives. These journals are mainstays of the field and it would be a great tragedy were they to be discontinued due to lack of funding. Revue des Études Juives is a venerable journal more than a century old which covers the whole range of the history, religion, literature, society, bibliography, and methodology of the study of Judaism. It has an international readership and range of contributors and its loss would leave a major gap in the academic study of Judaism and indeed in the field of Western history in general. Revue de Qumran is another international journal, which focuses on the Dead Sea Scrolls and is one of the major disseminators of scholarly information on the subject. Given the critical importance of the Scrolls for our understanding of the ancient history of Judaism, Christianity, the Bible, and religion in late antiquity, and also the widespread public interest in the Qumran discoveries, the cutting of this journal's funding would not only do great harm to all these academic fields, it would also send a very negative message to the public about the commitment of the CNRS to funding important work in the humanities.

Posted by David on July 20, 2004 11:58 AM