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.
Minute Book
In the Name of the Blessed God Amen
Whereas on or about the Year 5466 [1706] certain wholesome Rules and Restrictions have been made By the then Elders of our Holy Congregation, to Preserve Peace…
Responsum: On a Dispute over a Vineyard
Question: From Rhodes. When the Lord expanded the borders [see Deuteronomy 19:8] of the dispersion of the diaspora and granted us a remnant and remainder in the kingdom of Turkey, He treated us with…
Liturgy for the Ashmoret ha-boker (Morning Watch) Confraternity
The Zohar, in the portion of Naso on the verse and in the night His song shall be with…
Bet Yehudah (The House of Judah)
The Hakham Rabbi Abraham Monson, may God protect him, was a resident of Tétouan, where he was born and raised among his siblings and relatives. When he reached the appropriate age he married a woman…
Nishmat ḥayim (Breath of Life)
Behold, we have before us the head of the rationalists [or “rational theologians”], Maimonides, may his memory be for a blessing. In chapter three of Hilkhot teshuvah [Mishneh Torah, Laws of…
Letter to Jarig Jelles
From B. d. S.
[Dear Friend],
As far as Politics is concerned, the difference you ask about, between Hobbes and me, is this: I always preserve natural Right…
Letter to Isaiah Bassan
O great mountain (Zechariah 4:7), the exalted and raised (Isaiah 52:13), precious cornerstone (Isaiah 28:16), my teacher, my rabbi, may the Merciful One guard and bless him, may God protect him and…
Epitaphs
I have set this stone as a weight, not as a memorial, over my wife’s grave, lest (God forbid!) she rise from the dead and come back home.
Shilte ha-giborim (Shields of the Mighty)
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…
The Book of Abraham
The ten years that followed the arrival of Abraham and Beatrice in Lublin were peaceful and therefore happy, thanks to the Almighty, blessed be He. Abraham and Kalonymos gradually improved the print…
Harlem Holocaust
But all this came to an end one night. In almost every one of his novels, Warszawski retells the scene in the winter of 1944 when he came home at three o’clock in the morning, after a night of dancing…
Happy Times, Brittle World
Leo was planning to ask his father for money to get his car fixed, perhaps as a birthday present, even though he was sure his parents already had a present for him. Since the family’s return to Vienna…