Moses ben Gershon Parenzo was the last of a family of Hebrew printers active in Venice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The patriarch of the family, Jacob (d. 1546), came to Venice from Parenzo, on the Dalmatian coast of Italy. In 1629, Moses worked for the Venetian printer Giovanni di Gara.
Sifre ‘evronot—manuals for calculating the Jewish calendar, including leap years and holidays—were a popular genre of Ashkenazic illustrated manuscripts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries…
This drawing by Else Lasker-Schüler appeared on the frontispiece of her 1912 novel Mein Herz: Ein Liebes Roman (My Heart: A Novel of Love). Lasker-Schüler created a fantastical world in her poems and…
Edouard Brandon’s painting of Amsterdam’s famous Portuguese Synagogue (1675) is set on the Ninth of Av, a fast day commemorating and mourning the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Members of the…