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.
The Language of Faith: Selected Jewish Prayers
“Prayer is to religion what thinking is to philosophy. The religious sense prays as the intellectual organ thinks.” Prayer, to carry this saying of Novalis a step further, is a significant…
History of the Colony of Suriname
We will briefly mention several of his more important military expeditions. In the year 1731, Mr. Boeyé, Officer of the Christian Citizens Militia, received an order from the Council to carry out a…
Map of the City of Venice, ca. 1729
This eighteenth-century map of Venice includes the ghetto within which the city’s Jews were required to live from 1516 until Napoleon’s conquest of the Republic of Venice in 1797. The Venice ghetto…
The Esnoga (Portuguese Synagogue) in Amsterdam
To celebrate the opening of the Esnoga synagogue in Amsterdam in 1675, the Sephardic community commissioned the distinguished artist Romeyn de Hooghe to depict its dedication. In 1670, Amsterdam’s…
Jewish Divorce Proceedings
This engraving from a Dutch translation of Leone Modena’s Historia de’ riti Ebraici (History of the Jewish Rites) pictures a Jewish divorce ceremony in Amsterdam, in which the wife is presented with a…
Ketubah (Damascus)
This ketubah (marriage contract) from Damascus, signed on the 21st of Shevat 5466, or February 5, 1706, features a text set within an arch, and flanked on both sides and above with green and orange…
The Hanging of Jud Süss
Joseph ben Issachar Süsskind Oppenheimer was a financier and court Jew who served as adviser to Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg. Economic reforms enacted by Karl Alexander (and informed by…
Bomberg Jerusalem Talmud
Printing, which Jews adopted immediately after its invention, helped to unify far-flung communities. Where previously Jewish learning had been transmitted through the individual copying of manuscripts…
List of Books
During his life, Samuel Abbas amassed an impressive library that included 1,136 books in different languages—Latin (more than four hundred works), Hebrew, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, and…
Portrait of Solomon Ayllon (1660/64–1728), Chief Rabbi of the Sephardic Congregations in London and Amsterdam from 1700 to 1728
Portrait of Solomon Ayllon, Chief Rabbi of the Sephardic Congregations in London and Amsterdam from 1700 to 1728. This portrait was printed at the time of his death to commemorate him.
Sukkot Celebrations
Between 1723 and 1737, illustrator Bernard Picart partnered with the Dutch bookseller, editor, and publisher Jean-Frédéric Bernard on Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (R…
Yitzchak Rabin / Benjamin Netanyahu
Lavie was a leader of the Tel Aviv School, or 10+ group, artists who were among the first Israeli artists to incorporate pop art, found objects, and collage into their work. In the early 1960s, Lavie…