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There’s a stale, sour stench: a miscellany of heaped-up vegetables and fruits, cheese, fried fish, sweaty bodies, thighs, urine, and belching drunks. The smell sneaks harsh but titillating into the…
It has not always been easy to break with the more than two-thousand-year-old manner of translating the Hebrew Bible, the word-for-word manner. Thus in Gen. 14.1–2 (cf. vv…
We, the entire assembly of the congregation of Israel, believe that the Torah that is in our possession today is exactly the same as was written by Moses our master, peace be on him. From then until…
This page comes from the first of six volumes of Guilielmus Surenhuys’s translation of the Mishnah into Latin, printed in Amsterdam. At center is a depiction of Moses and Aaron standing beside a…
Frontispiece of Anshel of Kraków’s Merkeves ha-mishne (The Second Chariot), a Hebrew-Yiddish dictionary of biblical words. The earliest Yiddish book printed in Poland, it was published in 1534 in…
During his life, Samuel Abbas amassed an impressive library that included 1,136 books in different languages—Latin (more than four hundred works), Hebrew, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, and…
This is the frontispiece and first page of the Constantinople Polyglot Bible, the first of two multilingual editions of the Pentateuch printed by Eliezer Soncino in Constantinople. It contained the…
The art of chiromancy (palmistry), which divines a person’s nature and often his or her future by examining the palm and fingers (and sometimes forehead), dates back to the ancient Near East and…
A book titled in Ladino Obligasyon de los korazones [Duty of the Hearts] because it is translated from a text written by the pious gaon, our master Baḥya the judge, of blessed…
I adapted the above psalm to my situation, for the blessed Lord freed me from the Inquisition—although broken, I was released and free—where I saw eleven seeming penitents burned to death for heresy…