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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,”…
These silver Torah finials are from Corfu and were made between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by an artist whose initials were A.Z. They were used in the Scuola Greca Synagogue, which…
This silver circumcision set was crafted in Salonika in the Ottoman Empire. The cylindrical silver casket holds a circumcision knife; its handle is made from agate. A similarly shaped powder box and…
In 1583, Mattetiah ben David Spagnolo completed this illuminated Haggadah for Leon ben Judah Bili. Greek (Romaniote/Byzantine) Jews had lived on the island of Crete since the Second Temple period…
Glid’s memorial for the Jews of Salonika, Greece who were murdered in the Holocaust is modeled on Menorah in Flames, his 1990 monument for the murdered Jews of Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Both depict a tree…
When the Allatini Mills building was built in 1898, it was considered the largest industrial building in the “Orient” (then the catch-all term for the non-European world east of Europe). The first…
This Haggadah was produced in the city of Candia (now Heraklion), on the island of Crete, which was at the time under Venetian rule. The Haggadah follows the Passover seder according to the Romaniote…
The Harrison Miscellany is an early eighteenth-century codex of sixty leaves featuring delicate gouache illustrations and Hebrew texts. Each illustration (likely executed by a Venetian, non-Jewish…
This prayer book for the Rosh Hashanah festival from Crete is elaborately decorated inside with drawings of animals and people and has a colorful title page. Greek (Romaniote/Byzantine) Jews had lived…
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…
