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Jews first settled in Kaifeng, the capital of Henan province in central China, before 1127. According to scholars, they had come from India or Persia, spoke Persian, and worked as cotton dyers and…
This Haggadah was commissioned by Nathan ben Isaac Oppenheim of Vienna, a member of a prominent family of Court Jews. Its title page features a miniature of the sacrifice of Isaac being prevented by…
This print depicting a Jewish wedding in Fürth is from the beginning of the eighteenth century, a period of prosperity for the city’s Jewish community. There were between 350 and 400 Jewish families…
This elaborate Italian kabbalistic manuscript depicts the inner processes of the divine (the sefirot) in the shape of a tree (in Hebrew, ilan), or tree of life. Visualization plays an important part…
Like Torah scrolls, the scroll of the biblical book of Esther, read ritually in the synagogue on the holiday of Purim, must be completely unadorned. However, in the sixteenth century, for reasons…
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…
This scroll of Esther from Germany, created for use on the holiday of Purim, is extensively decorated, with illustrations of biblical scenes from the Esther story, as well as various flora and fauna…
This was the first printed map of the land of Israel in Hebrew. It was based on an earlier map by a Christian, Kruik van Adrichem, but Jacob Tsaddik removed the illustrations of the life of Jesus that…
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 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…
