Regardless of your politics or religious affiliation, I think you'll agree, that this is the funniest subheadline, maybe, ever.  Be...

This is 1762, and what happened was, a bunch of Jews beat up a Calvinist apostate Jew in Amsterdam. As it happens, he was a sailor, and hi...

Here's a rather interesting little postscript to an 1860* letter from Jonas Bondi to Isaac Leeser: It says, "I...

This is an interesting piece that I found on the Isaac Leeser digital archive ( link ), a handwritten letter from Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer...

Here is a postscript from an 1853 letter from Samuel Hyman Cohen to Isaac Leeser. Writing from California, Cohen tells Leeser which family ...

This guy *really* likes how Chasidim/ traditional east European Jewish men looked. Adam Neale , writing in 1818, in his Travels through so...

Here's an update to this post , about a 17th century Messianic prophecy for the year 1840-1, apparently predicting the French Revolution...

This is interesting; an entry for Brian Walton's 1653 - 56 London Polyglot Bible in Kohelet Shlomo - Collectio Davidis, the catalog of ...

Here's a nice ad for Passover products from 1842, under the rabbinic supervision of Rabbi Solomon Hirschell (1862-1842). From the Voice ...

This is really cool. This is a leaf from a manuscript called Sukkat David. It's a notebook of David Franco Mendes, 18th century Hebrew...

The Freimann-Sammlung digital library  at the University of Frankfurt recently added some fantastic bibliographies, including this importan...

Reader request:  If you go to Columbia University, or Harvard or Yale and you are a fan of this blog (sounds so swell-headed, but what ...

Many thanks to Michael Brocke for his cogent remarks on my post on a gravestone from Regensburg ( link ). Michael followed it up by sending ...

I was looking through a book called  Das jetzt Anno 1723 lebende Regensburg ... which is, as you surmise, about the history of Regensburg. ...

In 1603 rabbis in Germany[1] held a synod in Frankfurt, where they enacted takkanot . The takkanot were translated into German (three sepa...

One of the more interesting, creative works I've seen in the past couple of years is the Shabbos Blettel , which is an incredible (most...

I would like to post this wonderful free translation of the first part of Yehuda Leib Gordon's 1875 poem Kotzo Shel Yud . This was orig...

This is a fascinating anecdote I came across in R. Chizkiya Feivel Plaut's biography of the Chasam Sofer included in his Lik...

This fascinating article by Rabbi S. Felix Mendelsohn discusses a fundraising letter for a "Yeshivah Rabbi Akiba Eiger" of which i...