The long journey of a book of Leviticus that was hidden in a Vienna basement during the Nazi era, before eventually making its way to the National Library of Israel’s Conservation and Restoration Lab…

In modern-day Israel, the word “shluh” is sometimes used as an offensive term to describe a person of disheveled or messy appearance. The word in fact hails from Morocco, where it referred negatively to a certain ethnic group, and was used disparagingly by city dwellers to describe uncultured village folk…

Under a perpetual shadow of death, as train after train was sent to Auschwitz, Viktor Ullmann and Peter Kien, imprisoned in the Theresienstadt Ghetto, composed a searing opera satirizing the awful reality in Europe. Both were murdered, but a suitcase filled with Ullmann’s works survived to tell the story of the human spirit’s triumph over death

Habiba Msika reveled in the pleasures of free love in 1920s Tunis. A rejected paramour ultimately took her life

Chaim Topol was originally disgusted by ‘Fiddler on the Roof’. Soon after changing his mind, war in Israel took him off the stage…

Though England’s royal coronations are traditionally held at Westminster Abbey, over the years the Jews of the British Empire have celebrated the ascensions of new monarchs in their synagogues, with special prayers tailored for the occasion…

A recently discovered manuscript documents the first 130 years of the Portuguese Inquisition’s tribunals, mainly in Lisbon. Recorded on the pages are trials conducted by inquisitors and others against newly converted Christians accused of continuing to practice Judaism in secret…

Lev Levanda spent decades advocating for Jewish assimilation into Russian culture. It all changed after pogroms shook the empire…

The name Judith Montefiore is probably not famous enough in Israel. A brief search of the National Library archives revealed that not only was she an equal partner in her husband’s charitable endeavors, but she was also likely the anonymous editor of the first Jewish cookbook published in England…

Walther Rathenau, one of Germany’s wealthiest and most powerful men, was gunned down by radicals in 1922 and mourned by millions. A moving and timeless letter from his mother was read at the murderer’s trial.