Showing Results 1 - 10 of 11
This is the frontispiece to the first volume of Blasio Ugolino’s Thesaurus Antiquitatum Sacrarum, a thirty-four-volume collection of Latin treatises on Jewish customs, laws, institutions, and sacred…
God, blessed be He, knew very well that the people of Israel would be scattered among the nations and that most of them would not be able to understand the holy tongue [Hebrew]. Therefore our sages…
This is the title page of Me‘on ha-sho’alim (L’abitacolo degli oranti; Abode of the Supplicants), by the poet and translator Devorà Ascarelli, a member of the Catalan community in Rome. Me‘on ha-sho…
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…
“That which is well known needs no proof,” and the root cause is the skilled operating of the printing shop in the holy community of Żółkiew [Zhovkva], may the Rock preserve it, which was established…
This page comes from the first of six volumes of Guilielmus Surenhuys’s translation of the Mishnah into Latin, printed in Amsterdam. At center is a depiction of Moses and Aaron standing beside a…
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…
During his life, Samuel Abbas amassed an impressive library that included 1,136 books in different languages—Latin (more than four hundred works), Hebrew, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, and…
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…
