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.
Hasmonean Champions of Torah
Many of the people, everyone who forsook the law, joined them, and they did evil in the land; they drove Israel into hiding in every place of refuge they had.Now on the fifteenth day of…
A Sephardi Émigré Encourages Levantine Jews to Move to Mexico
It is a great pleasure for me to have this occasion, offered to me by the serial La Luz, to inform readers of the current situation in the Republic of Mexico, and to mention some of the reasons why…
Ottoman Jewish Opposition to Zionism
See how David Fresco, a Constantinople journalist, promoted Ottoman citizenship and opposed Zionism, revealing divisions within Ottoman Jewry.
Report on the Moral and Political State of the Israelites of Algeria and on the Means to Improve It
Among the diverse races of Algeria, the Jewish population merits special attention.At first glance, one sees a mass of people who comprise approximately one-fifth of the total civilian population…
A Memoir of a Childhood Shaped by Expulsion
Glikl of Hameln’s memoirs shed light on the fragile legal status of Jews in 17th-century Hamburg and Altona.
Five Years of My Life
V.The degradation took place Saturday, the 5th of January. I underwent the horrible torture without weakness.Before the ceremony, I waited for an hour in the hall of the garrison…
Baghdadi Jews and British Imperial Categories between Iraq and China
Explore how shifting imperial frameworks—from Ottoman to British rule—transformed the rights of Baghdadi Jews in China.
British Bureaucrats and Baghdadi Jewish Legal Identity during the Mandate Period
Explore how a British consul in China handled a petition for British protection from an Ottoman-born Jew rooted in East Asia.
Mizrahi Identity and the Myth of “Return”
From a Baghdadi-Jewish family, Ella Shohat critiques the Zionist narrative of return as a form of erasure of the history of the rupture and of Arab-Jewish identity and culture.
The Wandering Jews: Migration, Identity, and Bureaucracy
Joseph Roth chronicled the struggles of Jewish refugees in post–World War I Europe, caught between new borders and harsh immigration laws.
Ashkenazic Jewish Leaders Petition France’s National Assembly
In 1790, Ashkenazic Jewish leaders in France petitioned the National Assembly for equal rights, marking a turning point in Jewish emancipation.
The Sephardic Jewish Quest for Emancipation in Revolutionary France
Debates over equality in revolutionary France led to the 1790 emancipation of Bordeaux’s Sephardic Jews—the first step toward Jewish citizenship.