In the Sephardic tradition, a “marriage contract” (ketubah), a symbolic betrothal of God and Israel, is read before the Torah reading on the first day of the holiday of Shavuot, which celebrates the…
Menachem Mendel Schneersohn (1789–1866), the third rebbe of Chabad Hasidism, was a preeminent religious figure of nineteenth-century East European Jewry. The portrait is an early example of Boris…
In 1827, Tsar Nicholas I issued a statute that effectively made Russian Jews liable to military service, as part of a policy that sought to transform the Jewish population into integrated subjects who…