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.
Meditation
After Jehudah Halevi
How long will you remain a boy?
Dawns must end.
Behold the angels of old age.
Shake off temporal things then
the way a bird shakes off the night dew.
Dart like a swallow
from…
Diary
In the month of Tevet of the same year I entered that school and began studying Greek with tremendous dedication. I repented of all my previous actions and habits, just as I had promised my father (of…
Bi’ur ha-Gra: Glosses to Shulḥan arukh
6. “It is proper,” etc. The phraseology employed by the Tur is “And one should cover one’s head so that one should not be in a state of bareheadedness”—this is taken from the words of the Ba‘al ha-…
Toward a History of the Education of Russian Jews
In our first series of discussions, we explored the struggle between the government and the Jews, which was initiated by the former and ended with its triumph over the latter; in the second…
Moreh nevukhe ha-zeman (Guide for the Perplexed of Our Time)
According to the workings of the natural order there are three periods through which each primordial nation passes from the time it comes into being until it passes from the scene and perishes:
- The…
Rome and Jerusalem
What we have to do at present for the regeneration of the Jewish nation is, first, to keep alive the hope of the political rebirth of our people, and next, to reawaken that hope where it slumbers…
Portrait of Jacob Ries
Jacob Ries (1660–1751) of Prague first worked as a badchan (jester) for weddings. In 1710, he became court jester in Vienna under Charles VI. The artist of this portrait of Ries is not known. It…
Torah Curtain
This very early Torah ark curtain from Pesaro was embroidered by Rachel Olivetti and donated to the synagogue in honor of her marriage to Judah Montefiore. The Hebrew text is a poem celebrating and…
Emblem of the Jewish Butchers’ Guild
The merchants’ and artisans’ guilds introduced into Eastern Europe beginning in the thirteenth century by German immigrants resembled those in Western Europe in their exclusion of Jews. Jews therefore…
Klausen Book of Psalms
According to the colophon, the scribe in Prague who produced the Klausen Book of Psalms, Shabbetai Sheftel ben Zalman Auerbach (d. 1738), was descended from a family expelled from Vienna in 1669/70…
Kabbalistic Diagram
This page from a kabbalistic manuscript depicts the inner processes of the divine (the sefirot). Visualization plays an important part in kabbalah, and these diagrams provided a divine cartography…
Druksland
Druks was commissioned to create this self-portrait in the form of a topographical map, by Steendrukkerij de Jong & Co., a large European printing house, who used it as a promotional gift for their…