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[ . . . ] The Portuguese king, eager to find some logical excuse to vex me, called for an investigation to see if the number…
In the days of Antigonus, in about 3160 of creation, roughly 52 of the second rule of Ptolemy II over…
And now I will reveal to you why we call the Sabbath before Passover “the Great Sabbath.”
Know that the minister of Egypt is Aries [the ram], and Scorpio, which is with Aries, and its angel is Samael…
This silver Torah crown from Padua, Italy, is decorated with images of the tablets of law, incense utensils, the ark of the covenant,
and the headdress of the high priest.
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…
This manuscript page of Deuteronomy 1:1–7 is from a translation of the Hebrew Bible into Yiddish, from Italy. It is decorated with two storks and an ornate chapter heading with the opening word of the…
This Torah ark curtain from Venice was made by Simḥah, the wife of Menachem Levi Meshuallami, a member of a prominent family in the Venice ghetto. It is embroidered in silk and silk-metallic thread…
Tombstone of Shifra Tamari (d. 1565), Padua, Italy. In the early modern period, most Jewish tombstones in Italy were Italian Renaissance in style. Hebrew epitaph poems, like the one on this gravestone…
This elaborate Italian kabbalistic manuscript depicts the inner processes of the divine (the sefirot) in the shape of a tree (in Hebrew, ilan), or tree of life. Visualization plays an important part…
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…
