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This gravestone is inscribed in memory of Abraham Cohen Pimentel, who served as rabbi of the Portuguese Synagogue (Esnoga) in Amsterdam, and also as hakham in the Hamburg synagogue. A student of Saul…
Joseph Karo’s Shulḥan ‘arukh (Set Table)—printed together with the additions of Moses Isserles’s Mapah (Tablecloth) and first published in 1565—was a codification of Jewish law that was easy to use as…
Born to converso parents and baptized as Manoel Dias Soeiro, Menasseh Ben Israel moved as a boy with his family to Amsterdam, where they reverted openly to Judaism. In 1626, he established the first…
This illustration of a phlebotomy knife appears in an eighteenth-century Judeo-Arabic medical manuscript. Bloodletting, thought to balance the humors of the body, was an accepted medical treatment at…
These pages are from a manuscript, De dificuldade de ourinar (On Difficulty in Urinating), by a Jewish physician and surgeon in Amsterdam, Samuel de Leon Benavente (1643–1722). He was known for his…
This is the title page of Disputatio medica inauguralis, de pleuritide (Inaugural Medical Discourse: On Pleuritide), David Pina’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Leiden. Pina was a…
Established in 1616 as part of a yeshiva in Amsterdam, the Ets Ḥayim library continues to function to this day, making it the oldest operational Jewish library in the world. It moved to its current…
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…
This illustration of the (Aristotelian) cosmos appears in an eighteenth-century manuscript of Neḥmad ve-na‘im (Nice and Pleasant), David Ganz’s posthumously published book on astronomy.
This sheet by the calligrapher and scribe Iehudah Machabeu presents samples of different “lettering,” including Hebrew (at the top), Arabic, Greek, Castilian, English, French, Italian, and Latin. It…
