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.
The Ignoramus: A Cultural Sketch
Aron Wolf often terrified us children, and yet he was one of the most harmless people one can imagine. He never hurt anyone, nor did he ever approach any of us with as much as a word.
But…
Jeremiah and the Fall of Jerusalem
Jeremiah at the Fall of Jerusalem, commissioned by the crown prince of Prussia, and first exhibited to great acclaim at the Berlin Academy of Art in 1872, depicts the fall of Jerusalem to Babylonia in…
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
Religious forces are in fact only transfigured collective forces, that is, moral forces; they are made of ideas and feelings that the…
The Jewish State
The idea which I have developed in this pamphlet is a very old one: the restoration of The Jewish State.
The world resounds with outcries against the Jews, and these outcries have awakened the…
A Youth from Prague among the Chassidim
Scenes from everyday life are scarcely to be found in these pages. Rather you will feel that you have been transported for a while to some far-off, exotic country where different flowers grow and…
Our War Experience
This was the psychological state we were in when the war arrived. The war was not a political issue for us. We were thinking neither about the question of war guilt nor about a victorious outcome; we…
Life in a Hasidic Court in Russian Poland toward the End of the 19th and the Early 20th Centuries
Rumors of my grandfather’s plan to depart for Palestine reached his wife and children shortly after the Russian revolution of 1905. [ . . . ]
The…
Epistle against the Hasidim
For there are seven abominations in their hearts to ensnare the souls of the innocent, and they abolish public study of the Torah, and they cast off the yoke of the Torah from their necks and from the…
Arukh la-ner
In this way, in addition, the statement in the Talmudic chapter Ha-ro’eh (Berakhot 56) can be explicated: “There are three types of peace—a river, a bird and a cooking…
Jerusalem
I recognize no eternal verities save those which not only can be comprehended by the human intellect but can also be demonstrated and confirmed by man’s faculties. It is, however, a misconception of…
Jewish Woman in Izmir, Turkey.
This engraving depicting a Jewish woman in Izmir, Turkey, is from Cornelis de Bruyn’s travelogue, Reizen van Corn. de Bruyn door de vermaardste deelen van Klein Asia, de eylanden Scio, Rhodus, Cyprus…
Map of Suriname
By the time this sea pilot’s map of Suriname was created in 1680, there was a well-established Jewish community there. In the 1660s, Jewish communities arose on the Caribbean islands of Martinique…