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Reuben spoke in the marketplace with two men, inviting them to come to his house for the purpose of giving them the monies accrued from a business partnership, and they entered his house…
Rabbi Levi Yitskhok’s drayman—the one who wore
tales and tfiln as he smeared the wheels
of his wagon with tar—
turns up in the shape of a bunch of Jews
hanging around their houses,
washing the car
(w…
This print depicting a veiled Jewish bride assisted by two other women is from the beginning of the eighteenth century, a period of prosperity for the city’s Jewish community. There were between 350…
Sivlonot were, traditionally, gifts from the groom to his bride before the wedding. German Jewish brides and grooms gave each other belts, which were then worn during the wedding ceremony, sometimes…
On this illustrated page from a prayer book, written in an Ashkenazic hand, the scribe Simeon ben Naphtali has added, to the prayers said at a wedding, an image of the prophet Elijah (on the left)…
For German Jews, it was traditional in the wedding ceremony for the groom to perform the ritual of breaking a glass in remembrance of the destruction of the Temple by hurling it or banging it against…
Between 1723 and 1737, illustrator Bernard Picart partnered with the Dutch bookseller and publisher Jean-Frédéric Bernard on Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (Religious…
This page illustrating the blowing of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah is from a Yiddish book of customs from Italy. By the sixteenth century, Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazic Jews were the largest groups of…
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…
This bronze, cast, and gilt Hanukkah lamp from France is decorated with the head of a warrior wearing a laurel wreath, most likely meant to depict Judah Maccabee, leader of the uprising against the…
