Counting Esther's Teeth
Many years back, on parshablog, I discussed a prevalent chareidi belief that Jews and gentiles have a different number of teeth.
See:
Do gentile have more teeth than Jews? Do they have less? (Rav Chaim Kanievsky ztz”l, Rabbi Yitzchak Zilberstein)
Others who believe Jews have more teeth than gentiles (Rav Shmuli)
How dad actually IS Aramaic for teeth (that is, how Rav Shmueli was misled by Jastrow)
Were there always 32 teeth? (demonstrating that it is not a case of nishtaneh hateva.
These posts, particularly the first one, raised the ire of some folks, and one wrote an article to demonstrate that this is actually a well-sourced Jewish belief. I’d say that even if so, a well founded false belief is no less false, and holding it true in modern times, when evidence is more readily available, should perhaps be a good reason to reflect on whether a “Gadol” can effectively pasken where it borders on scientific reality.
At any rate, here’s the place in the article in HaPaamon where I am cited:
where footnote 4 goes to parshablog.
The article begins with something relevant to inyanei deyoma, and the relevant quote goes from the first page to the second of the article:
That is, in the Sefer Kaneh (?) to Rabbi Yosef Yuzpah ben Rabbi Moshe Kasman, on page 65 of the pdf. For a bit more context:
