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This manuscript page of Deuteronomy 1:1–7 is from a translation of the Hebrew Bible into Yiddish, from Italy. It is decorated with two storks and an ornate chapter heading with the opening word of the…
Jankiel’s Concert was inspired by a scene from Pan Tadeusz, Adam Mickiewicz’s 1834 epic poem, considered the national poem of Poland. The character of Jankiel, the Jewish innkeeper, is the most…
This lithograph of a micrographic drawing, believed to be from Poland, reproduces the text of the scroll of Esther in its entirety, as well as prayers and poems for the holiday of Purim. In the center…
A Grammar of the Hebrew Tongue was the first Hebrew-language manual printed in North America. Its author Judah Monis, knowing that all undergraduates at Harvard University were required to learn…
Frontispiece of Anshel of Kraków’s Merkeves ha-mishne (The Second Chariot), a Hebrew-Yiddish dictionary of biblical words. The earliest Yiddish book printed in Poland, it was published in 1534 in…
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…
This is the frontispiece and first page of the Constantinople Polyglot Bible, the first of two multilingual editions of the Pentateuch printed by Eliezer Soncino in Constantinople. It contained the…
The art of chiromancy (palmistry), which divines a person’s nature and often his or her future by examining the palm and fingers (and sometimes forehead), dates back to the ancient Near East and…
A prayer (Ha-nerot halalu anu madlikin (“These lights we burn”), usually recited after the blessings for lighting the Hanukkah candles, is inscribed on the back panel of this Hanukkah lamp from…
The masterpiece of eighteenth-century Ladino literature is the encyclopedic commentary on the Bible, Me‘am lo‘ez (From a People of Foreign Tongue), by Jacob Huli, the first volume of which was…
