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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…
The merchants’ and artisans’ guilds introduced into Eastern Europe beginning in the thirteenth century by German immigrants resembled those in Western Europe in their exclusion of Jews. Jews therefore…
Mikri (“little one”) Wife of Yehuda Hamon (d. 1642)
Yesterday I was playing on the earth, in my husband’s embrace, like a tiny lamb, And an angel came and preyed upon me in his wrath…
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…
In the back of a manuscript collection of astronomical texts, which includes one of Abraham Ibn Ezra’s works on the use of the astrolabe (a tool for astronomical calculations), is a set of crude but…
This ketubah (marriage contract) from Damascus, signed on the 21st of Shevat 5466, or February 5, 1706, features a text set within an arch, and flanked on both sides and above with green and orange…
While ketubot (marriage contracts) are usually written in Aramaic, Karaite ketubot are written in Hebrew. They are often pentagonal in shape, most often with a pointed bottom. This example has a…
O God of hosts, restore us;
show Your favor that we may be delivered.
You plucked up a vine from Egypt;
You expelled nations and planted it.
You cleared a place for it;
it took deep root and…
The use of wall niches for Torah scrolls was a feature of some of the earliest synagogues and continues today in Mizrahi communities. This striking faience-tile mosaic structure would have decorated a…
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…
