Showing Results 1 - 10 of 46
The ketubah is a religious and legal contract of marriage. Traditionally, ketubot outline the conjugal and economic conditions of a marriage and are written in Aramaic. This ketubah was copied and…
This micrographic drawing designed for a sukkah decoration is the best-known artwork of Israel David Luzzatto. Micrography, a form of drawing originally created by scribes, in which lines of miniature…
This map showing the Naḥmanides Synagogue in Jerusalem, named after the medieval rabbi, was made in Italy by a Jewish scribe and is an example of a “pilgrimage scroll.” Pilgrimage scrolls were known…
The book of Esther (also known as the Scroll [megillah] of Esther) is read out loud on the holiday of Purim. This example of a scroll from Venice has Hebrew text framed by arcades and borders…
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…
This Haggadah, decorated in the Ashkenazic tradition, was copied in northern Italy. As is traditional for Ashkenazic Haggadahs, illustrations appear in the margins and frame the text. At the top left…
Moses ben Abraham Pescarol’s illuminated scroll of Esther, completed in Ferrara, constitutes one of the oldest examples of an illustrated manuscript of this biblical book, which is chanted on the…
Tombstone of Shifra Tamari (d. 1565), Padua, Italy. In the early modern period, most Jewish tombstones in Italy were Italian Renaissance in style. Hebrew epitaph poems, like the one on this gravestone…
This elaborate Italian kabbalistic manuscript depicts the inner processes of the divine (the sefirot) in the shape of a tree (in Hebrew, ilan), or tree of life. Visualization plays an important part…
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…
