Showing Results 41 - 50 of 85
This is the frontispiece to the first volume of Blasio Ugolino’s Thesaurus Antiquitatum Sacrarum, a thirty-four-volume collection of Latin treatises on Jewish customs, laws, institutions, and sacred…
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…
This Torah ark, installed in a synagogue in the Italian town of Urbino, is a fine example of Renaissance Judaica. Carved from walnut in the early sixteenth century, the ark belonged to the Sephardic…
The Scuola Grande Tedesca is the oldest of five synagogues in the Venetian ghetto and was built in 1528 by the local Ashkenazic community. Although only its five windows are visible from the street…
Founded in 1548, the Italian Synagogue of Padua was moved to its current location by 1603. It was renovated in the nineteenth century and restored again after World War II, when the Scuola Grande…
Home to a Jewish community from at least the thirteenth century, Pesaro later became the refuge of Portuguese and Spanish Jews in the sixteenth century. In 1642, a few years after the town’s Jews were…
This page illustrating the blowing of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah is from a Yiddish book of customs from Italy. By the sixteenth century, Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazic Jews were the largest groups of…
Ḥay ibn Yaqẓān, composed by the Muslim philosopher Abū Bakr ibn Tufayl al-Qaysi (1110–1185), relates the story of Ḥay ibn Yaqẓān, literally “Alive, son of Awake,” as he grows up alone on a deserted…
This page from a kabbalistic manuscript depicts the inner processes of the divine (the sefirot). Visualization plays an important part in kabbalah, and these diagrams provided a divine cartography…
This cast and gilded bronze amulet from Italy includes a pair of dolphins as a design element. It is inscribed in Hebrew: “May no evil grieve you.”
