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Hittite couple sacrificing to bull, Alaça Hüyük, Turkey. In this relief, a king and queen, or perhaps a priest and priestess, stand at an altar and make an offering before a bull. On the symbolism of…
Before the priestly blessing is recited in the synagogue, those making the blessing ritually wash their hands. It is also customary for Jews to wash their hands before entering a synagogue for worship…
This watercolor from the Gennadius Library’s Costume Album collection, in Athens, depicts two Jewish women—a widow (left) and a married woman (right)—in the colorful traditional attire of…
This sumptuous velvet and gilt-metal-thread embroidered Torah ark curtain most likely began its life as the wedding gown of a well-to-do Jewish woman of the Ottoman Empire. It was unstitched and…
Hybrid creature with wings on stone relief, Carchemish, 9th century BCE. The creature has the body and head of a lion, an additional human head, and wings, paralleling some of the elements in Ezekiel…
This Torah curtain was made in Ankara, Turkey. The motifs of a central menorah and hands making the priestly blessing were common in other Ottoman Jewish ritual folk art. Embroidered verses from the…
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…
Paper cuts have been a tradition of Jewish folk art, with the earliest record of one dating to the fourteenth century. Given the widespread availability of paper in Europe by the mid-nineteenth…
El Tiempo (Time) was the first Ladino-language newspaper published in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul, Turkey) and the longest-running Ladino newspaper in the city, with a run of almost sixty…
The origin of this Torah scroll is in Turkey. It was donated by the Camondo family, one of the most important Jewish families in Istanbul, many of whose members settled in Paris and greatly…
