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I know that we’ve just passed Purim and are nowhere near the season of Hanukkah, but trust me, this is a perfectly good time to talk about this topic. That’s because this article isn’t actually Hanukkah-themed at all. Today, we’re going to talk about what I call orthographic domestication: the process by which an orthographic system converts lexical items from another system by making them fit cleanly within its own norms. In my freshman year at Lawrence, I had a few interactions with former Jewish Studies professor Elliot Ratzman. One time we were eating lunch and talking about Jewish mysticism, and he told me something along the lines of “Yeah, usually the books that spell Kabbalah with a