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The Mayse-bukh (Book of Stories), a collection of more than two hundred and fifty stories in Yiddish, was popular among Jews in Western and Eastern Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth…
The Gazeta de Amsterdam was printed by David de Castro Tartas, in that city, not regularly, from 1672 to 1702. This is considered the first Jewish newspaper, although it has no particular Jewish…
Jacob Teixeira was born in Amsterdam in 1724 to Judith Nunes Henriques (b. Amsterdam, 1703–1732) and Joseph Teixeira (b. London, 1699–1775), who descended from the wealthy Portuguese Teixeira family…
Song at the Sea (Exodus 15), Leningrad Codex, 1009 CE. The photo shows the first fourteen verses of the poem (Exodus 15:1–14) and a few prose verses from the end of the preceding chapter. The text of…
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 rare example of a Roman ketubah (marriage contract) from the seventeenth century was written on the occasion of the marriage of Menahem ben Samuel Zadik to Zevia, daughter of the prominent banker…
The writers of the radical press (also) have the full right to life, to be free, and to seek their fortune in—a bread line.
According to the colophon, the scribe in Prague who produced the Klausen Book of Psalms, Shabbetai Sheftel ben Zalman Auerbach (d. 1738), was descended from a family expelled from Vienna in 1669/70…
The cover of Far folk un heymland features a red flag and Yiddish writing in which the letter qof has been stylized to resemble a hammer and sickle. The book was published when World War II was still…
