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.
A Memoir of a Childhood Shaped by Expulsion
Glikl of Hameln’s memoirs shed light on the fragile legal status of Jews in 17th-century Hamburg and Altona.
Five Years of My Life
V.The degradation took place Saturday, the 5th of January. I underwent the horrible torture without weakness.Before the ceremony, I waited for an hour in the hall of the garrison…
Baghdadi Jews and British Imperial Categories between Iraq and China
Explore how shifting imperial frameworks—from Ottoman to British rule—transformed the rights of Baghdadi Jews in China.
British Bureaucrats and Baghdadi Jewish Legal Identity during the Mandate Period
Explore how a British consul in China handled a petition for British protection from an Ottoman-born Jew rooted in East Asia.
Mizrahi Identity and the Myth of “Return”
From a Baghdadi-Jewish family, Ella Shohat critiques the Zionist narrative of return as a form of erasure of the history of the rupture and of Arab-Jewish identity and culture.
The Wandering Jews: Migration, Identity, and Bureaucracy
Joseph Roth chronicled the struggles of Jewish refugees in post–World War I Europe, caught between new borders and harsh immigration laws.
Ashkenazic Jewish Leaders Petition France’s National Assembly
In 1790, Ashkenazic Jewish leaders in France petitioned the National Assembly for equal rights, marking a turning point in Jewish emancipation.
The Sephardic Jewish Quest for Emancipation in Revolutionary France
Debates over equality in revolutionary France led to the 1790 emancipation of Bordeaux’s Sephardic Jews—the first step toward Jewish citizenship.
Indian Jews Confront Racism in 1951 Israel
A 1951 cartoon, “Gandhi’s Teaching in Immigration and Emigration,” shows Indian Jews protesting racism and exclusion in early Israel.
Sefarad Postponed: A Cuban-American Jew seeks Spanish citizenship
A Cuban-American Sephardic Jew recounts her efforts to obtain Spanish citizenship.
A Memoir of Hardship and Hope
A Jewish woman’s story of work, family, faith, and upheaval, revealing daily resilience amid crisis, childbirth, labor, and communal struggle.
The Coat of Arms of Lopez and Suaço
In the seventeenth century, members of the Suasso (Suaço, Suasco) family, bankers originally from Spain, lived in Holland and England. Antonio (Isaac) Lopez Suasso resided in The Hague during the…