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Adah Isaacs Menken (1835–1868) achieved celebrity first as an actress, later gaining some literary following for her poetry. Uncertainty surrounds Menken’s family history, as she claimed various…
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…
The first Jewish community was established in Kingston, Jamaica by refugees from Spain and Portugal after 1492. This tombstone in the cemetery of She‘are Shalom Synagogue marks the grave of Abraham…
In 1670, Amsterdam’s Portuguese Jewish community commissioned a new synagogue, which, when finished, was the largest in the world. The master mason Elias Bouman, a non-Jew who had helped design the…
The Jewish community of Syria dates back to biblical times. After 1492, the original community was augmented by refugees from Spain and Portugal. The centers of Syrian Jewish life were in the cities…
On this illustrated page from a prayer book, written in an Ashkenazic hand, the scribe Simeon ben Naphtali has added, to the prayers said at a wedding, an image of the prophet Elijah (on the left)…
For German Jews, it was traditional in the wedding ceremony for the groom to perform the ritual of breaking a glass in remembrance of the destruction of the Temple by hurling it or banging it against…
Between 1723 and 1737, illustrator Bernard Picart partnered with the Dutch bookseller and publisher Jean-Frédéric Bernard on Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (Religious…
This page illustrating the blowing of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah is from a Yiddish book of customs from Italy. By the sixteenth century, Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazic Jews were the largest groups of…
