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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…
This siddur from Greece contains the prayers of the Romaniote (Greek-speaking Jewish) community of the eastern Mediterranean. It is open at a piyyut (liturgical poem) called “God’s Beloved Daughter,”…
This rare example of a Roman ketubah (marriage contract) from the seventeenth century was written on the occasion of the marriage of Menahem ben Samuel Zadik to Zevia, daughter of the prominent banker…
According to the colophon, the scribe in Prague who produced the Klausen Book of Psalms, Shabbetai Sheftel ben Zalman Auerbach (d. 1738), was descended from a family expelled from Vienna in 1669/70…
This manuscript copy of Sefer ha-kavanot (The Book of [Kabbalistic] Intentions [in Prayer and Performance of Precepts]) by Ḥayim Vital was written in Meknes, Morocco. The kabbalists in Safed stressed…
This magnificent maḥzor (holiday prayer book) was copied—and most likely decorated—by the scribe Isaac bar Mordechai ha-Kohen (Isaac Lankosh of Kraków). (In several places, the name “Isaac” has…
This page is from a manuscript containing stories in Yiddish. It was copied and illustrated in Tannhausen, Germany between 1580 and 1600, for the Ulma family, who owned a number of important…
This maḥzor (holiday prayer book), containing the Jewish prayers according to the Italian rite, was written by the scribe Eliezer ben Abraham of Pisa, for Yema, the widow of Moses of Modena (referred…
In 1583, Mattetiah ben David Spagnolo completed this illuminated Haggadah for Leon ben Judah Bili. Greek (Romaniote/Byzantine) Jews had lived on the island of Crete since the Second Temple period…
Moses ben Abraham Pescarol’s illuminated scroll of Esther, completed in Ferrara, constitutes one of the oldest and most unusual examples of illustrated manuscripts of this biblical book, which is…
