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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…
This print depicting the Jewish cemetery of Fürth, Germany, is from the beginning of the eighteenth century, a period of prosperity for the city’s Jewish community. There were between 350 and 400…
This Haggadah from Venice was commissioned by Moses ben Gerson Parenzo, the last of the Parenzo Hebrew printers, and issued at the Caleoni press on behalf of the Bragadini family. This page shows the…
This text of an excommunication, found in David Aboab’s manuscript of Sefer emet ve-yatsiv (True and Certain), chronicles a conflict in the Sephardic congregation of Curaçao. The first Jews arrived in…
This Haggadah from Prague, printed by Gershom and Grunim Katz with illustrations that are thought to be by Ḥayyim ben David Shaḥor, is one of the earliest Haggadahs ever printed. It was the first…
This is a Spanish edition of David Nieto’s Mateh Dan (The Tribe of Dan). David Nieto’s best-known work constitutes a defense of the oral law and rabbinic tradition, addressed to former New Christians…
In the back of a manuscript collection of astronomical texts, which includes one of Abraham Ibn Ezra’s works on the use of the astrolabe (a tool for astronomical calculations), is a set of crude but…
While ketubot (marriage contracts) are usually written in Aramaic, Karaite ketubot are written in Hebrew. They are often pentagonal in shape, most often with a pointed bottom. This example has a…
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)…
Shabbetai Tzvi was the central figure of a messianic movement that swept the Jewish world in the mid-seventeenth century. Born in Izmir (Smyrna), as an adolescent Shabbetai Tzvi embarked on the study…
