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.
Shir Leshalom (A Song for Peace)
Let the sun come up today,
Let the morning shine,
All the prayers and plaintive words,
Won’t bring us back to life.
For we whose light is darkened now,
Are covered by the dust,
The bitter tears…
Sefer kise Shelomoh (Solomon’s Throne)
When our teacher Rabbi Solomon, who was a rabbi here in Aleppo, passed away without any male children, the rabbis [of the city] consulted among themselves, and with the elders of the people and the…
Sihah be-erets ha-hayim (A Conversation in the Afterlife)
A dialogue in the land of the living between our teacher, R. Moses Maimonides, the Spaniard, and our Teacher Moses, son of Menaḥem [Mendelssohn] of Dessau, and an anonymous third person.On the day of…
The Three Brothers
“Back at home, I pulled myself together and reflected on what had happened. Given how the people had behaved when they heard the wrongheaded and hateful rabbi’s curse of excommunication, I realized…
Shire tiferet (Songs of Glory)
How could the wise of heart envisage the final outcome of the matter,
Seeing that, when he was just a quarter of a year old, they placed him in the bulrushes?
None has arisen like him amongst the…
Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef (The Offshoots of Jacob Joseph)
I heard from the venerable rabbinic scholar, R. Nahman, an interpretation of the words of [the Besht] that one should intend in every word that he utters submissiveness…
Nineteen Letters on Judaism
You ask me for my opinion on the question which at present agitates so greatly the minds of men, emancipation; whether I consider it feasible and desirable, according to the spirit of Judaism, our…
Paris, Rome, Jerusalem, or the Religious Question in the Nineteenth Century
In all times of transition such as the one we are now undergoing, on every occasion when human society passes from one era to another era, from one way of doing things to another way of doing them…
Phaedon
Following the example of Plato, I have Socrates in his last hours relate the arguments for the immortality of the human soul to his students. The dialogue of the Greek author, which has the name Phaed…
The Brazilian’s Song from the Opera La vie parisienne
Brazilian, I’m rich, I’ve got dough
There’s plenty of gold in my sack
Paree, here I am, I’ve come back
And richer than ever before!
Two times was I here in the past
My suitcases bulging with gold
A…
Jew in the Holy Land
This illustration is from Franciscan monk Eugène Roger’s La terre saincte (The Holy Land), a comprehensive study of the Land of Israel which includes dozens of etchings depicting Jewish, Muslim, Druze…
Self Portrait in his Map of Eretz Israel
When Jacob ben Abraham Tsaddik created the first printed map of the Holy Land in Hebrew, he included this portrait of himself. The Hebrew under the image of the sun intertwined with a Star of David…