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.
Lessons of Jewish Moral Theology
These lessons (of which the first forty-seven paragraphs were already published in the Rivista israelitica) were written in 1832 for the use of those youth who, upon completing their primary and…
Kiryah ne’emanah (Faithful City)
1. Giedymin, the great prince of Lithuania, who dwelt in the fortress of the city of Troki, once went forth…
Wedding Procession
This engraving depicting a Jewish wedding procession was an illustration in a four-volume book by Johann Jakob Schudt (1664–1722), Jüdische Merkwürdigkeiten (Jewish Curiosities), published in Germany…
Harrison Miscellany
The Harrison Miscellany is an early eighteenth-century codex of sixty leaves featuring delicate gouache illustrations and Hebrew texts. Each illustration (likely executed by a Venetian, non-Jewish…
Jewish Divorce Proceedings
Johann Christoph Georg Bodenschatz's Kirchliche Verfassung der heutigen Juden, sonderlich derer in Deutschland (Religious Constitution of Today’s Jews, Especially Those in Germany), published in…
Ku-bukh (Book of Cows)
Title page of the first known printed version of the Ku-bukh (Book of Cows), a sixteenth-century collection of Yiddish fables, published in Verona, Italy in 1595. The later compendium of Yiddish…
Tashlich
Traditionally performed on the afternoon of the first day of Rosh Hashanah, Tashlich is a rite in which Jews symbolically cast away their sins by throwing breadcrumbs into a body of moving water…
Café of the Inner Mind: Men’s Room
Simmons is best known for artworks in which she stages dolls, plastic figurines, and other inanimate objects in tableaus and then photographs them. In 1987, she began to use wooden ventriloquists’…
Amulet to Be Hung over the Crib of a Newborn
The Hebrew word Shaddai—another name for God—is etched in the center of this ornate silver amulet from Italy.
Bayit ne’eman (Faithful House)
In Midrash ḥazit [Midrash Rabbah Song of Songs] it is stated:
And besides that Koheleth was wise, he also taught the people knowledge; ye…
Lev avot (Heart of the Fathers)
Simeon ben Shetaḥ would say: You should cross-examine the witnesses extensively, and take care with your words, lest they learn how to lie from them [m. Avot 1:9].
Solomon ha-Levi explained: The…
Regimiento de la vida (Regimen of Living)
The rule of the aforementioned fifth and sixth items, which concern going to bed and rising. It is stated and summarized from what has been said in the past, that sleep being so harmful…