Showing Results 1 - 10 of 11
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 supposed author of Josippon (an account of Jewish history from the Garden of Eden to the destruction of the Second Temple) was Josephus Flavius, though it is now generally believed that the book…
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…
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…
Established in 1616 as part of a yeshiva in Amsterdam, the Ets Ḥayim library continues to function to this day, making it the oldest operational Jewish library in the world. It moved to its current…
This flyer calls for the Jewish community to pay a ransom to rescue Jewish captives from the 1686 siege of Buda, which resulted in the capture of the Hungarian city from the Ottoman Empire by armies…
This illustration is from Franciscan monk Eugène Roger’s La terre saincte (The Holy Land), a comprehensive study of the Land of Israel which includes dozens of etchings depicting Jewish, Muslim, Druze…
I am astonished to see that for reading just the names of the holy books, one receives his reward, as if he had read and studied them all. If so, then one will not make much of an effort to study…
How great is the benefit of the printing houses, for thanks to the power of the printing press, the Torah is enhanced everywhere in the world. The rabbis are certainly making the effort to produce…