Showing Results 1 - 10 of 12
You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust…
This tombstone of Abraham Roccas (d. 1587) is located in the Cloister of the Papal Archbasilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, in Rome, Italy.
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…
In a dream, in a night vision, while [I was] asleep upon [my] bed during my imprisonment, a voice called in my ears. The voice was the voice of Jacob, like the voice of my father, may his memory be…
Tombstone of Shifra Tamari (d. 1565), Padua, Italy. In the early modern period, most Jewish tombstones in Italy were Italian Renaissance in style. Hebrew epitaph poems, like the one on this gravestone…
What shall the passive and lackluster do
if the pious and accomplished are swiftly felled by angels?
Quake, nations, and rich and poor fear ye the judgment day.
When the…
[The lessons a mother should give her son]: My son, you should know that before your body looked the way it does now, it was nothing. You were formed in my belly from the drops of fertility that came…
Lord, I want to return to your word,
Lord, I want to pour out my wine,
Lord, I want to go, to go to you,
Lord, I do not know what should be done,
I am alone.
I am alone in empty air,
In terror of…
Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering…
This tombstone for Menahem Ventura, son of Abraham Ventura, is one of only four that have survived from the Jewish cemetery in Bologna. (After the entire Jewish community was expelled from this town…
