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.
Dedication (to Gracia Nasi): Consolações às Tribulações de Israel
The heart is prized as the human body’s noblest and most important organ, for it is the first to feel the pain which any other part of the body…
Livro da união geral da nacão: On a Book by Manuel de Pina
Joining the meeting [of the Mahamad; board of governors] was ḥakham [R.] David Cohen who reported that it was brought to his attention that a very scandalous book from…
Judeo-Persian Haggadah (Kaifeng)
. . . and caused us to reach this appointed time.On the first night, one should recite the blessing “who has kept us alive . . .” But on the second night, one should not read it.Blessed are…
To the wheel that turns the river’s waters
To the wheel that turns the river’s waters
And brings them upward from the flowing deep,
I sing this song, a song to banish sorrow.
For all who love and cherish and desire
The ways of poetry and…
According to the Torah
According to the Torah, a man can acquire a woman in one of three ways:
Through a document, through silver, or through intercourse. God is the one that gives a prudent wife.
In truth, one must begin…
A Lovely Song about an Event in Hamburg
Which tells how a certain man took up with a prostitute in Hamburg, his first wife hearing of this came from Poland, how he was forced to give her a writ of divorce and this almost cost him his life…
Couplets of Joseph the Righteous
“It is only because the Lord was with us,”
says the old Israel;
in You lies holiness,
Israel’s praises.
“It is only because the Lord was with us,”
You elevated us above other men,
You saved us from…
Introduction: Salamone de Rossi’s Ha-shirim asher li-Shelomoh (The Songs of Solomon)
May the language of truth be established forever, or as the poet …
Counting the Omer
Leiba recognized that Fraydel was in danger of disappearing down the well of her own thoughts.
Fraydel was a secret keeping herself from the world. When she spoke, it was yet another way of keeping…
The Status Quo
[…] Must we conclude that Israeli society is doomed to experience a Kulturkampf, and that the Zionist synthesis is marching ineluctably toward its undoing? Before answering that question, let us…
This Month Is for You: Observing Rosh Hodesh as a Woman’s Holiday
Rosh Hodesh is celebrated only eleven times a year. Tishre, the month Rosh Hodesh coincides with Rosh Hashanah, is omitted. If Rosh Hodesh falls on two days, the ceremony may…
Kreuzer Sonata Advertisement
A Portuguese-language advertisement for February 5–6, 1915, performances in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, of the Grande Companhia Israelita’s adaptation of Tolstoy’s novella The Kreuzer Sonata.