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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…
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 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…
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…
Printing, which Jews adopted immediately after its invention, helped to unify far-flung communities. Where previously Jewish learning had been transmitted through the individual copying of manuscripts…
Frontispiece of Anshel of Kraków’s Merkeves ha-mishne (The Second Chariot), a Hebrew-Yiddish dictionary of biblical words. The earliest Yiddish book printed in Poland, it was published in 1534 in…
This is the frontispiece and first page of the Constantinople Polyglot Bible, the first of two multilingual editions of the Pentateuch printed by Eliezer Soncino in Constantinople. It contained the…
This page from a birkon (Grace after Meals) is an example of the work of Aaron Wolf Herlingen (Aaron Schreiber), a prominent eighteenth-century scribe and artist known for his illustrated Grace after…
The frontispiece of this Haggadah shows the biblical Aaron on the left, carrying the Temple incense, and Moses on the right, holding the tablets of the Law. The scene at the bottom of the page shows a…
This page from a Haggadah produced in Amsterdam is an example of the work of Joseph Ben David, a prominent eighteenth-century scribe and artist known particularly for his illustrated Haggadahs. This…
