Sample Sources
The sources below are those contained in our three curated collections—covering themes of Passover, Gender Roles, and Holocaust Resistance. They represent a fraction of the thousands of sources that will be available when the full site launches in 2024.
Ketubah (Oran)
A ketubah is a religious and legal contract of marriage. Traditionally, it outlines the conjugal and economic conditions of a marriage and is written in Aramaic. This ornate ketubah from Oran, Algeria…
The Russian Jew in the United States: Sweatshops in Philadelphia
[ . . . ] We enter a sweatshop on Lombard, Bainbridge, Monroe or South Fourth Street. It may be on one of several floors in which similar work…
“L’aigle déplumé! . . .” (The Bald Eagle!)
This caricature of Napoleon III (1808–1873), the last monarch of France, was made after the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), when Napoleon was being held in captivity in…
Drawings Published in Harper’s
An illustration for the monthly magazine Harper’s, The Thirty-Second Indiana Regiment (Colonel Willich) Building Pontoons in Kentucky was likely drawn by Henry Mosler during the Civil War. Engravings…
The Maccabees
Today it is possible for us to observe the process of Hellenization in individual features only. But these features are sufficiently significant to enable…
The Essence of Judaism (Second Edition)
During the thousands of years of its history, Judaism has learned and experienced a good deal. In its people the commanding urge to think further, to struggle with ideas, has…
The Song of the Dying: To the History of Jewish Creativity under the Nazi Occupation
Among the illegal publications that appeared in Poland during the Nazi occupation, one can find a small anthology of poems entitled Z otchlani, from the Abyss. This modest volume, published by the…
Havurat Shalom: Draft of a Covenant
We join together in this covenant out of a sense of divine mission, out of a search for the realization of the sacred in our lives as individuals and as brothers and sisters in a community. Though…
The Polish Lad
If my father had been able to foresee even a thousandth part of the trials I was to endure he might have been rather less ardent on the night my mother conceived me. . . . Now, of…
Jewish Man and Woman from Frankfurt
The Jewish couple in Frankfurt am Main depicted here are wearing distinctive clothing that would have clearly identified them as Jews: the man’s collar, hat, and cloak, and the woman’s ruff and winged…
Tikun keriyah le-kol laylah ve-yom (Supplications for Every Day and Night)
The frontispiece of this book of penitential prayers, printed in Amsterdam by David de Castro Tartas, proclaims the pro-Sabbatean beliefs that were then widespread in the Amsterdam Jewish community…
Jacob Huli’s Me‘am lo‘ez (From a People of Foreign Tongue)
The masterpiece of eighteenth-century Ladino literature is the encyclopedic commentary on the Bible, Me‘am lo‘ez (From a People of Foreign Tongue), by Jacob Huli, the first volume of which was…