The Mysterious Collector Who Founded Our Islamic Manuscript Collection

The collector Yohanan Ben David left his art collection to the Israel Museum and his manuscript collection to the National Library of Israel. The latter bequest formed the core of the Library’s Islamic manuscript collection. Despite his considerable stature in the art world, he is largely unfamiliar to the general public. Here we take a look at the life of this enigmatic collector.

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“Israel is a graveyard for Jewish languages”: An Interview With Dr. Tamar Eilam Gindin

The culture of Iranian Jews in Israel is bound up with a language that is nearly lost: Judeo-Persian. According to Dr. Tamar Eilam Gindin, a linguist and scholar of Iran, Judeo-Persian is not just one language. It is rather like a tapestry woven over thousands of years of Jewish history in Persia, so that sometimes different dialects were even found in the same city. In this interview, Dr. Eilam Gindin discusses the fate of Judeo-Persian in Israel as well as the secret language of Persian Jewry…

An Arab Qur’an with a Persian Identity

The Persian language as we know it today emerged after the Arab conquests of the 8th century CE. One of the National Library of Israel’s treasured manuscripts contains the first known example of New Persian to appear on the world stage…