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.
Memoirs
For the two reasons specified below, I have given myself the surname “Wasserzug”; the first reason is that when I was five or six years of age, I was playing with some young children, I believe, in a…
A Seder Night
A medieval rabbi barely escapes from a blood libel accusation at his own Seder table in this prescient nineteenth-century story by the famous German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine.
A Dirge for the Ninth of Av
Let us chant, my brothers,
this dirge together,
for God severed our hands
by this disaster.
A Sermon contra Naphtali Herts Wessely
Beware! This man, Wessely, is an impious man. Beware, do not draw near to him! God, the Lord of Hosts, knows that for the sake of the glory of your Holy Torah I have come this day to hew down he who…
Lev ha-Ivri (The Heart of a Jew)
What would our ancestors have done if they had seen a Jewish community appointing a prayer-reader and a rabbi for themselves dressed in the vestments of a Christian priest, and setting up an idol in…
Words of Peace and Truth
There is one people in the world alone who are not sufficiently concerned with “human knowledge” and who have neglected the public instruction of their youth in the laws of etiquette, the sciences and…
The Book of the Governing of My Household
The man should not purchase meat until he has taken counsel with his wife to see which type of meat she wants him to take, so that the wife cannot later say that it is dark meat…
The March 17th Decree
Laws are always tainted by the passions and the prejudices of the legislator.
—Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws
In 1807, Mordecai Blum, his wife Rebecca, and his son David were living in a…
House of David de Pinto
Originating from the Iberian Peninsula, the de Pinto family were wealthy merchant bankers who lived in Amsterdam from the seventeenth century on. In Spain, members of the family had converted to…
Ketubah
This is the marriage contract (ketubah) that Isaac, the son of Aaron Sasportas, gave to Rebecca, the daughter of Abraham Pinto. A floral decoration stemming from a vase at the bottom of the contract…
Doors to the Bimah, Rema Synagogue (Krakow)
The Rema Synagogue, named after the famous rabbi and scholar Moses Isserles (known by the Hebrew acronym “Rema”), was built in 1553 in the city of Kazimierz (today a district of Kraków). It was…
Maḥzor
On this illustrated page from a prayer book, written in an Ashkenazic hand, the scribe Simeon ben Naphtali has added, to the prayers said at a wedding, an image of the prophet Elijah (on the left)…