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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 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.
Sifre ‘evronot—manuals for calculating the Jewish calendar, including leap years and holidays—were a popular genre of Ashkenazic illustrated manuscripts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries…
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 diagram of the cosmos is from a treatise on astronomy, Sefer mareh ha-ofanim (The Appearance of the Heavenly Beings), by Solomon ben Abraham Avigdor. The treatise was mostly a translation of…
The Hebrew calendar uses a system of intercalation, adding an additional month to the calendar year to synchronize the regular twelve-month calendar with the moon, sun, and seasons. The Hebrew…
