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Printing, which Jews adopted immediately after its invention, helped to unify far-flung communities. Where previously Jewish learning had been transmitted through the individual copying of manuscripts…
This diploma of Doctor of Medicine was awarded to Jacob Mahler by the University of Padua, Italy. Mahler, born in Bingen-on-Rhine, Germany, studied medicine and philosophy, and in 1695 was awarded a…
Title page of the first known printed version of the Ku-bukh (Cow Book), a sixteenth-century collection of Yiddish fables, published in Verona, Italy in 1595. The later compendium of Yiddish stories…
This ketubah (marriage contract) from Padua, Italy, marks the marriage of Samuel ben Gerson ha-Kohen me-ha-ḥazanim (“of the cantors,” or Cantarini) and Colomba bat David Aziz. The groom was a…
This maḥzor (holiday prayer book), containing the Jewish prayers according to the Italian rite, was written by the scribe Eliezer ben Abraham of Pisa, for Yema, the widow of Moses of Modena (referred…
Moses ben Abraham Pescarol’s illuminated scroll of Esther, completed in Ferrara, constitutes one of the oldest and most unusual examples of illustrated manuscripts of this biblical book, which is…
Dialoghi di m. Magino Gabrielli Hebreo, sopra l’utile sue inventioni circa la seta (Dialogues of Magino Gabrielli, Hebrew, On the Utility of His Inventions in Silk Production), printed in Rome, is a…
The great work called Mishneh Torah by the rabbi, our master, Moses ben Maimon of blessed memory, comprises fourteen books.
Were it not that the Lord was with us (Psalms 124:1), the Torah might have…
This is the frontispiece to the first volume of Blasio Ugolino’s Thesaurus Antiquitatum Sacrarum, a thirty-four-volume collection of Latin treatises on Jewish customs, laws, institutions, and sacred…
Like Torah scrolls, the scroll of the biblical book of Esther, read ritually in the synagogue on the holiday of Purim, must be completely unadorned. However, in the sixteenth century, for reasons…
