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 Woman Poet
You hold me now completely in your hands
My heart beats like a frightened little bird’s
Against your palm. Take heed! You do not think
A person lives within the page you thumb.
To you this book is…
A Short History of Israel, Notes and Glosses
A hundred generations, yes, a hundred and twenty-five,
had the strength each day
not to eat this and that (unclean!)
not to say this and that,
not to do this and that (unjust!),
and with all this…
The Book of the Ghetto Wars: Between the Walls, in the Camps, in the Forests
The Book of the Ghetto Wars is intended to bring together a selection of the materials in our possession—testimony, journals and notes, documents, studies, poems, and stories—that were created during…
The Language of Faith: Selected Jewish Prayers
“Prayer is to religion what thinking is to philosophy. The religious sense prays as the intellectual organ thinks.” Prayer, to carry this saying of Novalis a step further, is a significant…
History of the Colony of Suriname
We will briefly mention several of his more important military expeditions. In the year 1731, Mr. Boeyé, Officer of the Christian Citizens Militia, received an order from the Council to carry out a…
Map of the City of Venice, ca. 1729
This eighteenth-century map of Venice includes the ghetto within which the city’s Jews were required to live from 1516 until Napoleon’s conquest of the Republic of Venice in 1797. The Venice ghetto…
The Esnoga (Portuguese Synagogue) in Amsterdam
To celebrate the opening of the Esnoga synagogue in Amsterdam in 1675, the Sephardic community commissioned the distinguished artist Romeyn de Hooghe to depict its dedication. In 1670, Amsterdam’s…
Jewish Divorce Proceedings
This engraving from a Dutch translation of Leone Modena’s Historia de’ riti Ebraici (History of the Jewish Rites) pictures a Jewish divorce ceremony in Amsterdam, in which the wife is presented with a…
Ketubah (Damascus)
This ketubah (marriage contract) from Damascus, signed on the 21st of Shevat 5466, or February 5, 1706, features a text set within an arch, and flanked on both sides and above with green and orange…
The Hanging of Jud Süss
Joseph ben Issachar Süsskind Oppenheimer was a financier and court Jew who served as adviser to Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg. Economic reforms enacted by Karl Alexander (and informed by…
Bomberg Jerusalem Talmud
Printing, which Jews adopted immediately after its invention, helped to unify far-flung communities. Where previously Jewish learning had been transmitted through the individual copying of manuscripts…
List of Books
During his life, Samuel Abbas amassed an impressive library that included 1,136 books in different languages—Latin (more than four hundred works), Hebrew, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, and…