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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…
Idol-quickening instructions, Babylonia, 6th century BCE. The “mouth-washing” ritual was a ceremony for transforming a newly manufactured idol into a living deity. The instructions include these…
Harvesting and threshing in Egyptian painting, from the tomb of Pa-heri (New Kingdom, 18th dynasty, 15th century BCE). In the lower register, on the right, reapers are followed by a woman and child…
In The Writing on the Wall, Attie brought the ghosts of pre-World War II Jewish life in Berlin temporarily to life by projecting black-and-white slides of Jewish schools, bookstores, kosher butchers…
Drawing of a wooden synagogue from Maximilian Syrkin’s 1910 article, “Drevníya derevyannyye sinagogi v pol’she litve” (Wooden Synagogues in Polish Lithuania). Wooden synagogues were a common form of…
This calendar, Almanac for the Year 5675: Souvenir der Hochschule Bar Iochai und Altenhaus in Miron, was probably a fundraising giveaway for an old-age home and for the high school that Eliezer Ya…
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…
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…
Cyrus Cylinder, Babylonia. In the inscription, Cyrus, the king of Persia (reigned 559–530 BCE), declares that he was chosen by Marduk, the god of Babylon, to free its citizens from the tyranny and…
