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This map of the Temple in Jerusalem made in Safed by a Jewish scribe comes from an example of a “pilgrimage scroll,” also known as an “itinerary,” because they included instructions for visiting holy…
In this seventeenth-century map, Jerusalem is depicted as a fairly dense city within a wall, with only a few structures outside. Men in Arab dress stand in small groups conversing with one another in…
In The Writing on the Wall, Attie brought the ghosts of pre-World War II Jewish life in Berlin temporarily to life by projecting black-and-white slides of Jewish schools, bookstores, kosher butchers…
In the eponymate of Dayan-Ashur, on the 14th of Aiaru (Iyyar), I set out from Nineveh . . .
I set out from the Euphrates and approached Aleppo. They (i.e., the inhabitants of Aleppo) were afraid of…
Harvesting and threshing in Egyptian painting, from the tomb of Pa-heri (New Kingdom, 18th dynasty, 15th century BCE). In the lower register, on the right, reapers are followed by a woman and child…
Idol-quickening instructions, Babylonia, 6th century BCE. The “mouth-washing” ritual was a ceremony for transforming a newly manufactured idol into a living deity. The instructions include these…
The panel shown here is part of an obelisk that contains a long inscription summarizing the triumphs of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III (r. 858–824 BCE) until the thirty-third year of his reign. The…
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 siddur from Greece contains the prayers of the Romaniote (Greek-speaking Jewish) community of the eastern Mediterranean. It is open at a piyyut (liturgical poem) called “God’s Beloved Daughter,”…
From May through August 1541, the forces of the Ottoman Empire laid siege to the city of Buda (present day Budapest, Hungary) and captured it, ushering in 150 years of Ottoman rule. This illustration…
