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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…
To celebrate the opening of the Esnoga synagogue in Amsterdam in 1675, the Sephardic community commissioned the distinguished artist Romeyn de Hooghe to depict its dedication. In 1670, Amsterdam’s…
The frontispiece of this book of penitential prayers published in Amsterdam, Tikun li-kro’ laylah va-yom (A Tikkun to Read Day and Night) has a three-tiered illustration. The top level depicts Moses…
Statesman, merchant, and communal leader Baron Manuel (Isaac Nunes) de Belmonte (d. 1704) was the Spanish agent general in the Netherlands from 1664 and resident (consul) of the King of Spain from…
This etching depicts a body being brought for burial in the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish cemetery at Ouderkerk, the oldest Jewish cemetery (est. 1614) in the Netherlands, located on the Amstel River.
These four etchings were made by Rembrandt van Rijn for Menasseh Ben Israel’s book, Piedra Gloriosa (Glorious Stone), a messianic treatise. Clockwise from upper left, they illustrate the biblical…
This is a technical diagram from Joseph Delmedigo’s Sefer Elim (Book of Elim), a scientific and philosophical work published by Menasseh Ben Israel.
These three pages come from a catalogue of books listed for sale by Samuel Ben Israel Soeiro, a bookseller in Amsterdam. It lists first the Hebrew books and then the ones in Spanish. He printed the…
The press of Solomon Proops was one of the most prolific and well-known Hebrew presses in eighteenth-century Europe. The printer’s mark used by Proops (which does not appear on all his works) depicts…
It is known that one who lacks books lacks knowledge, for a man’s knowledge is limited in its reach by the reach of his books; and there is no artist without tools. Many new books came…
