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Arad letter (Order Concerning Rations), from the remains of the Judahite fortress at Arad, in the Negev, 7th or 6th century BCE. The Arad ostraca provide an impression of the provincial administration…
This is the title page of Me‘on ha-sho’alim (L’abitacolo degli oranti; Abode of the Supplicants), by the poet and translator Devorà Ascarelli, a member of the Catalan community in Rome. Me‘on ha-sho…
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 siddur from Greece contains the prayers of the Romaniote (Greek-speaking Jewish) community of the eastern Mediterranean. It is open at a piyyut (liturgical poem) called “God’s Beloved Daughter,”…
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…
An abecedary is a list of the letters of the alphabet, written in order, for instruction or practice in writing, and perhaps also for other purposes. Four abecedaries were written on this large…
Hebrew manuscript illustration underwent a revival in eighteenth-century Germany and Central Europe. As wealthy Jews began to commission such manuscripts, a school of scribes and artists emerged. This…
This letter hailing Shabbetai Tzvi as the Messiah was signed by twenty-four prominent members of the Amsterdam Jewish community who had founded a learned society, Yeshuot Meshiho, in his honor. It was…
Isaiah Scroll, Qumran, ca. 125 BCE (Hellenistic Period). This is the longest of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the only scroll from the Qumran caves to be preserved in its entirety. It varies in more than 2…
