An ass walks into a bar and orders a glass of wine

I spent many hours of my childhood learning with my grandfather. He was a very precise person , and did everything he could to counter my childish tendency to accept generality and 'basically getting the gist,' whether in terms of pronunciation, phrasing or translation. All three were very much neglected in my formal education, and he posed a frustrating but valuable counterweight. He always used to say that you have to pay attention to where the חמר is. Is it in the barn or in a barrel?*



Midrash Kohelles Rabbah i. iv

חנינא בן אחי ר' יהושע אזל להדיה כפר נחום ועבדון ליה מינאי מלה ועלון יתיה רכיב חמרא בשבתא, אזל לגביה יהושע חביביה ויהב עלוי משח ואיתסי, א"ל כיון דאיתער בך חמרא דההוא רשיעא לית את יכיל שרי בארעא דישראל, נחת ליה מן תמן לבבל ודמך תמן בשלמיה

I found this footnote here, a publication from 1910 called The Monist, a Quarterly Magazine Devoted to the Philosophy of Science, Vol. XX..

The footnote continues, and it's amazing:



In other words, Lowe saw the חמרא--which חנינא was riding, no less (רכיב חמרא)--and put it in the barrel, or in the wine goblet as the case may be. Wow!

Unfortunately not every dusty old tome is online in digital form (yet) and I don't have any scheduled appearances in a great library for a little while, so I did not get the chance to see what exactly William Henry Lowe's The Fragment of Talmud Babli Pesachim: Of the Ninth Or Tenth Century in the University Library, Cambridge says. So I'm taking the Monist's word for it (for now).

What of W.H. Lowe? He is quoted in this very book in JQR vol. xiii, 1901 The Talmud in History by Abram Isaacs of NYU:




That is, he was a friend of the Talmud. Just not necessarily one who allowed his love of חידוש to get in the way of common sense.

* Thinking about it, this doesn't sound like the sort of quip that is original. I wonder, if it is not original, when and from whom did he hear it?