Sample Sources
The sources below are those contained in our three curated collections—covering themes of Passover, Gender Roles, and Holocaust Resistance. They represent a fraction of the thousands of sources that will be available when the full site launches in 2024.
Rome and Jerusalem
What we have to do at present for the regeneration of the Jewish nation is, first, to keep alive the hope of the political rebirth of our people, and next, to reawaken that hope where it slumbers…
Portrait of Jacob Ries
Jacob Ries (1660–1751) of Prague first worked as a badchan (jester) for weddings. In 1710, he became court jester in Vienna under Charles VI. The artist of this portrait of Ries is not known. It…
Torah Curtain
This very early Torah ark curtain from Pesaro was embroidered by Rachel Olivetti and donated to the synagogue in honor of her marriage to Judah Montefiore. The Hebrew text is a poem celebrating and…
Emblem of the Jewish Butchers’ Guild
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…
Klausen Book of Psalms
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…
Kabbalistic Diagram
This page from a kabbalistic manuscript depicts the inner processes of the divine (the sefirot). Visualization plays an important part in kabbalah, and these diagrams provided a divine cartography…
A Woman Drawing Water from a Well
Sifre ‘evronot—manuals for calculating the Jewish calendar, including leap years and holidays—were a popular genre of Ashkenazic illustrated manuscripts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries…
D-C
In the late 1970s, after a period in which he painted only in black and white, Held began using bright colors in his paintings of hard-edged geometric shapes, enabling him to explore space, volume…
Drawing for the Film “Felix in Exile”
Kentridge’s signature practice is to draw an image in charcoal, photograph it, and then repeatedly erase, redraw, rephotograph it, and then animate it on film. Felix in Exile is the fifth film in…
Emek ha-bakhah (Valley of Tears)
Granada was under control of the Ishmaelites for seven hundred years, until Ferdinand and Isabel, the monarchs of Spain, besieged it, for many days, and captured the whole region of that kingdom in…
Tratado de los sueños (Treatise on Dreams)
Illustrious sir, having frequently thought about and recalled many treatises which in the presence of Your Worship were practiced during the time when I enjoyed your divine…
Shalshelet ha-kabbalah (The Chain of Tradition): On Spirits
Now, after God has made known to you all of this by means of the toil of my hands, having gathered and bound them together, may the strength of my hand grow to write to you and to present before you…