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 1670 Expulsion of the Jews from Vienna
This illustration, from an antisemitic publication, Jüdische neue Zeitung vom Marsch aus Wien und anderen Orten der jetzigen zwölff Jüdischen Stammen (Jewish Newspaper from the March to Vienna and…
David Oppenheim
David Oppenheim (1664–1736) was the chief rabbi of Prague. Born in Worms, he was the son of a communal leader and nephew of Samuel Oppenheim (1630–1703), financier and war contractor to Habsburg…
Lighting the Sabbath and Festival Candles
This woodcut depicts Jewish women and girls lighting candles to mark the beginning of the Sabbath or a holiday. The illustration appears in a Yiddish translation by Shim’on Levi Gintsburg, printed in…
Marriage Ceremony
This illustration depicting a Jewish wedding taking place under a huppah (wedding canopy) near a synagogue appeared in the book Jüdisches Ceremoniel (Jewish Ceremonial Customs), by Paul Christian…
Sefirotic Tree
Kabbalist Elijah Menaḥem ben Abba Mari Ḥalfan constructed this diagram, now stained and torn, with the assistance of his tutor Abraham Sarfati. It depicts the sefirotic system and includes Ḥalfan’s…
A Grammar of the Hebrew Tongue
A Grammar of the Hebrew Tongue was the first Hebrew-language manual printed in North America. Its author Judah Monis, knowing that all undergraduates at Harvard University were required to learn…
Jacob Huli’s Me‘am lo‘ez (From a People of Foreign Tongue)
The masterpiece of eighteenth-century Ladino literature is the encyclopedic commentary on the Bible, Me‘am lo‘ez (From a People of Foreign Tongue), by Jacob Huli, the first volume of which was…
Bronze Physician’s Mortar
This bronze physician’s mortar from Verona, Italy, is decorated with a seven-branched candelabrum, flanked by the Hebrew letters mem and resh, likely the initials for the Hebrew term for “physician’s…
Thesaurus Antiquitatum Sacrarum I
This is the frontispiece to the first volume of Blasio Ugolino’s Thesaurus Antiquitatum Sacrarum, a thirty-four-volume collection of Latin treatises on Jewish customs, laws, institutions, and sacred…
Sabbath
Gurvich began increasingly to focus his work on his Jewish heritage after his first trip to Israel in 1955. His paintings depict Jewish life and culture in dreamlike imaginary worlds, in a style and…
Fish Bargain, NYC
Aron’s photographs of Jewish communities portray their vibrancy but also document aspects of Jewish cultural, religious, and economic life that are changing and/or in danger of vanishing altogether…
Dachau, 1985
Plachy took this photograph on one of her many trips to Central and Eastern Europe. A photojournalist, she has said that she is drawn to scenes peripheral to the actual news story. Here, reflections…