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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…
The frontispiece of this book of penitential prayers published in Amsterdam, Tikun li-kro’ laylah va-yom (A Tikkun to Read Day and Night) has a three-tiered illustration. The top level depicts Moses…
The frontispiece of this book of penitential prayers, printed in Amsterdam by David de Castro Tartas, proclaims the pro-Sabbatean beliefs that were then widespread in the Amsterdam Jewish community…
Despite gender restrictions, Jewish women played central roles as religious leaders in the early modern period. Meet the female leader of one of the most controversial cults in Jewish history.
Jacob (Jakob) Frank (ca. 1726–1791) was a controversial and charismatic messianic figure who attracted a significant Jewish following in Eastern Europe. After his death, his daughter Eva Frank (1754…
Nathan of Gaza (also known as Nathan Benjamin ben Elisha Ḥayim ha-Levi Ashkenazi) was born in Jerusalem and moved to Gaza in around 1663. The son of a respected religious scholar, he became a scholar…
This photograph of two Jews reduces them to an abstraction, a single black shape, in a composition that includes the round shapes of manhole covers, the curving black lines of a street grating, and…
Shabbetai Tzvi was the central figure of a messianic movement that swept the Jewish world in the mid-seventeenth century. Born in Izmir (Smyrna), as an adolescent Shabbetai Tzvi embarked on the study…
Glicenstein depicted the Jewish Messiah as a semi-nude figure in the classical style, with bowed head and tethered to his seat. It received early recognition, admired by Rodin and praised in the…
Solomon Molkho, the sixteenth-century messianic pretender, included a sketch of his own fanciful flag in his signature. His flag, modeled after those of the Maccabees, included the Hebrew word “Macabi…
