Showing Results 1 - 10 of 35
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…
The music for “Se’u She‘arim (Lift Up Your Heads, O Gates)” resembles the choral marches found in grand opera. The words are from Psalm 24: O gates, lift up your heads! Up high, you everlasting doors…
Salamone de Rossi (1570–1630), composer, singer, violinist, and musician in the Gonzaga court in Mantua, is best known for his introduction of polyphony into synagogue music. Composer Samuel Naumbourg…
The first edition of Baal T’fillah was published in 1871. A compendium of over 1,500 Jewish traditional melodies, according to the traditions of German, Polish, and Portuguese (Sephardic) Jews, 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…
