I’ve been doing some research for a journalist friend in Los Angeles over the past few months and it’s taken me to some interesting places.

The depths of ancestry.com, for one, and also into Mainz’s Jewish heritage, the New Jewish Cemetery and helped me scratched the surface of Hebrew culture.

I now know that the last line of symbols on many Jewish tombstones

תנצב”ה

is an abbreviation for

תהיה נשמתו צרורה בצרור החיים

and means

May his soul be bound up in the bond of everlasting life

And that the structure of Hebrew numerals is based on a quasi-decimal alphabetic numeral system using the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, going from Aleph (1) to Tav (400)

“Now, there’s not many people know that” as Michael Caine might say

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY85a15n5QY

Or not, as the case may be…

13 Jan This entry was published on 13 January, 2013 at 13:00 and is filed under History, Mainz. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.