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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…
This astrolabe, an astronomical instrument, from the sixteenth century is inscribed in Hebrew characters.
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…
A page from Libro de embezer las linguas Ingleza y Yudish (Book for Learning English and Yiddish), a guidebook for Ladino-speaking immigrants in Yiddish and English with Ladino transliteration and…
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 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…
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.
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…
