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Esther Scroll
Shalom Italia
1640
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Engraver, etcher, and draftsman Shalom Italia was, as his name indicates, from Italy, where his family worked in the Mantua printing industry. However, probably attracted by the opportunities in the growing metropolis, he made his way to Amsterdam by 1641. Among Shalom Italia’s works are illustrated ketubot (marriage contracts), book illustrations, and portraits of the community’s leading figures, such as Menasseh Ben Israel, who was the founder of Amsterdam’s first Hebrew printing press and an advocate for the readmission of Jews to England.
In 1654, Rahel bat Hannah Rovigo married Isaac ben Abraham de Pinto, a member of a prosperous Jewish family of merchant bankers in Amsterdam. The ketubah (marriage contract), which outlines the…
The three art nouveau-influenced covers by Ber Kratko for three of Y. L. Peretz’s plays feature somewhat grotesque figures. The one for Vos in fidele shtekt (What Sticks in the Fiddle) features a…
Home to a Jewish community from at least the thirteenth century, Pesaro later became the refuge of Portuguese and Spanish Jews in the sixteenth century. In 1642, a few years after the town’s Jews were…