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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 illustration of an armillary sphere is from a treatise on astronomy, Sefer mareh ha-ofanim (The Appearance of the Heavenly Beings), by Solomon ben Abraham Avigdor. The treatise was mostly a…
The supposed author of Josippon (an account of Jewish history from the Garden of Eden to the destruction of the Second Temple) was Josephus Flavius, though it is now generally believed that the book…
The Yeshivat Dijet Synagogue was located in the Hara Seghira (the “small ghetto”) neighborhood of Djerba, Tunisia. It was one of several synagogues in this area, which, along with Hara Kebira, were…
Tzvi Hirsch ben Jacob Ashkenazi was a talmudist and community leader from Moravia. He was also known as the Ḥakham Tzvi, a Sephardic scholarly title he is thought to have received from the rabbinic…
This is a prayer book for women in Ladino for the whole year, with its order of blessings at the end. And the order for washing the hands and many other laws applicable to all of the most common…
Why this knowledge, which is called “the science of kabbalah” [ḥokhmat ha-kabbalah] contradicts itself, and each one of these names (i.e., “science” and “kabbalah”) is not suitable to it…
The kinnor, called in a foreign tongue arpa (harp), is a wooden instrument made in the likeness of a wide-open entrance without their being doors on it, and its upper threshold is broad and its lower…
Most witnesses told their stories voluntarily. These stories were equivalent to their souls yet they were willing to donate them to the Library of Moloch because they believed that to tell was to…
The concept of a resurrected culture after Auschwitz is illusory and contradictory, and every construct that still comes into being has to pay a bitter price because of that. But since the world…