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 Diaspora: Construction of Jewish History
This is the eighteen-hundred-year era of the diaspora, of unprecedented suffering, of uninterrupted martyrdom without parallel in world history. But it is also a period of spiritual alertness, of…
Medical-Critical Letter Written by Doctor Joseph Vita Castelli to His Friend, a Doctor, Regarding a Serious and Complicated Case of Acute Fever
Art, which gives men the means to persevere and cure some sicknesses, seems nowadays to depend on philosophy, which is that great and clear source that produces all that is luminous and useful. I am…
Responsa binyan tsiyon (Responsa: Building Zion)
The Holy Community of Altona, Friday, 29 Marheshvan 5621[14 November 1860]
To my dear friend, father of my son-in-law, the distinguished rabbi, our Teacher, R. Shemaryahu Zuckerman, may his…
Statement of Mourning
Do you deem me to be hard and evil-hearted in that I should hasten to do a match during my period of mourning? Am I to forget the love of the wife of my youth, my pure dove, whom God graciously gave…
Imprisonment of Jewish Leaders
[To my brother PN, your brother Islah.
It is well for me here]. May the gods seek after your welfare at all times. And now, . . . PN son of PN went to Syene and did/made . . . .
Behold, these are the…
Reenslaving Manumitted Slaves
The word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord after King Zedekiah had made a covenant with all the people in Jerusalem to proclaim a release among them— that everyone should set free his Hebrew…
God Speaks to Cyrus
Thus said the Lord to Cyrus, His anointed one— Whose right hand He has grasped, Treading down nations before him, [ . . . ]. I am the Lord and there is none else;
Beside Me, there is no god.
I…
Buying a Calf
One calf, two years old, white, the top of its humpback is cleft (?). Haraa, daughter of Talimmu, sold to Neriyama, son of Ahiyakam, for 23 shekels of white silver, 1/8 per shekel impure, of average…
Ezra Reads the Teaching to the People
When the seventh month arrived—the Israelites being [settled] in their towns—the entire people assembled as one man in the square before the Water Gate, and they asked Ezra the scribe to bring the…
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…
Letters to Conrad Habicht
Bern, Thursday [18 or 25 May 1905]Dear Habicht,Such a solemn air of silence has descended between us that I almost feel as if I am committing a sacrilege when I break it now with some inconsequential…
Among Our Distant Brethren
(Continued from issue 76 [of Ha-Tsefira])The commandment of hospitality is well-developed in our city, and particularly in the mellah. But emissaries from the kollelim in the “Four Lands” stay with…