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Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in the Piazza San Marco, Venice, Italy.Born in Pittsburgh, Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was brought up in Oakland, California. She graduated from Radcliffe College in…
Ḥay ibn Yaqẓān, composed by the Muslim philosopher Abū Bakr ibn Tufayl al-Qaysi (1110–1185), relates the story of Ḥay ibn Yaqẓān, literally “Alive, son of Awake,” as he grows up alone on a deserted…
This dictionary of maritime terms, a hand-written manuscript, includes definitions in Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and French.
This astrolabe, an astronomical instrument, from the sixteenth century is inscribed in Hebrew characters.
This elaborate Italian kabbalistic manuscript depicts the inner processes of the divine (the sefirot) in the shape of a tree (in Hebrew, ilan), or tree of life. Visualization plays an important part…
This bronze physician’s mortar from Verona, Italy, is decorated with a seven-branched candelabrum, flanked by the Hebrew letters mem and resh, likely the initials for the Hebrew term for “physician’s…
Kabbalist Elijah Menaḥem ben Abba Mari Ḥalfan constructed this diagram, now stained and torn, with the assistance of his tutor Abraham Sarfati. It depicts the sefirotic system and includes Ḥalfan’s…
This is a technical diagram from Joseph Delmedigo’s Sefer Elim (Book of Elim), a scientific and philosophical work published by Menasseh Ben Israel.
This foldout calendar is a beautifully illuminated feature that appears in a sefer ‘evronot. Works of this genre were Jewish calendar handbooks for calculating the dates of religious holidays and…
Der pinkes (The Book of Records, or The Annals) appropriated the term for the old-fashioned record book of a Jewish community or institution to name a very new phenomenon: the first “annual for the…
