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Mendes da Costa was best known for the reliefs he sculpted for buildings in Amsterdam (many of which were figures of animals) in the style of the Niewe Kunst, the Dutch variant of Art Nouveau. But he…
The first Ashkenazi Jews to settle in Amsterdam, refugees from the Chmielnicki uprising in Poland and the Thirty Years War, initially joined the Sephardi congregation there. In 1671, they established…
Based on a painting, now lost, by Maurits Leon, this lithograph by Johannes Heinrich Rennefeld (1832–1877) seems to depict a scene from an 1837 novel about Spinoza by German Jewish author Berthold…
The Last Breath is one of the genre paintings depicting the lives of fishermen and their families for which Jozef Israëls was best known. In this scene, a woman is weeping over the body of her husband…
During the holiday of Sukkot, four plant species are used in rituals in the synagogue. One of these is the etrog (citron). While containers to protect the etrog later became more common, they were…
The wealthy Sephardic family of Curiel d’Acosta is believed to have commissioned the artist Romeyn de Hooghe to make this large pen-and-ink drawing to commemorate the circumcision, in Amsterdam, of a…
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 broadsheet is based on a famous model of the Temple in Jerusalem, owned by Jacob Judah Leon, a rabbi from the Netherlands. Probably produced in Amsterdam, the poster includes illustrations of the…
To celebrate the opening of the Esnoga synagogue in Amsterdam in 1675, the Sephardic community commissioned the distinguished artist Romeyn de Hooghe to depict its dedication. In 1670, Amsterdam’s…
Born and raised in Oran, Algeria, the talmudic scholar Jacob Sasportas served as rabbi of Tlemcen. Forced to flee Morocco due to political unrest, in 1647 he embarked on a life of wandering. In 1664…
