NEW YORK, NY.- This fall, a new exhibition at The Grolier Club offers a world tour of Jewish literary creativity across many centuries and thousands of miles, featuring manuscripts from The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS). Jewish Worlds Illuminated: A Treasury of Hebrew Manuscripts from The JTS Library, on view in The Grolier Club’s ground floor gallery from September 17 through December 27, 2025, features more than 100 manuscripts and books exploring the diversity of cultures in the lands in which Jews resided, including Iberia (Spain and Portugal), Italy, France, the Hapsburg Empire, German Lands, Yemen, Iran and Iraq, North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and Egypt.

Drawn from the important rare book collection of JTS’s Library, Jewish Worlds Illuminated is the most extensive display ever of The Library’s Hebrew manuscript treasures and is the first exhibition at The Grolier Club devoted exclusively to Jewish books. Curated by Professor David Kraemer, Sharon Liberman Mintz, and Dr. Marcus Mordecai Schwartz, Jewish Worlds Illuminated is made possible by support from the David Berg Foundation, the Dorothy Tapper Goldman Foundation, The Pine Tree Foundation, and The Artists Against Antisemitism, and with generous support from Grolier Club members.

“The vast majority of the world’s Jews have lived in diasporas—scattered across many lands, cultures, and languages,” said Professor David Kraemer. “In these communities, Jewish wisdom and creativity often found their fullest expression in the creation of books. Manuscripts became vessels of memory, imagination, and identity, preserving the richness of Jewish life from Antiquity into modern times. Within their pages are the voices of scholars and poets, scribes, and artists, which afford us a window into the everyday experiences of Jews across the globe.”

Exhibition Highlights

Organized geographically, with ten areas of focus, Jewish Worlds Illuminated begins with works from Iberia (Spain and Portugal), where Sephardi Jews participated in a multicultural golden age alongside Muslim and Christian neighbors for centuries. On view is the Prato Haggadah (ca. 1300), an unfinished illuminated manuscript containing the text and order for the Passover Seder that provides a rare look at the step-by-step process of the work’s creation, with some pages fully illustrated and others only outlined.

Italy is home to one of the oldest continuous Jewish communities in Europe, and during the Renaissance, affluent Italian Jews commissioned luxurious manuscripts reflective of their social and economic status. On view is the Rothschild Mahzor (Florence, 1490), a book of prayers that is one of the most lavishly decorated Hebrew manuscripts produced in Italy in the fifteenth century. The scribe copied the text in semi-cursive script, and the floral designs, gold leaf, and colorful initials reflect the artistry of multiple Florentine workshops.

Manuscripts on view in the exhibition also reflect the richness of Jewish culture in France from the 13th through the 18th centuries. A special highlight is the medieval Mahzor Vitry (1204), which is the earliest surviving record of the emerging practices of Ashkenazi Jewry, with prayers for the entire year and customs for life-cycle events.

In the early 18th century, a revival of luxurious Hebrew manuscripts emerged in the German-speaking lands of the Hapsburg Empire, blending traditional Jewish texts with contemporary European artistic styles. On view is a miniature manuscript of daily prayers (Vienna, 1724), depicting a woman seated in her bedroom with an open book for the Shema prayer, which is traditionally recited prior to retiring to bed.

In medieval times, Ashkenazi Jews of German lands created very large, illustrated prayer books to be used by the cantor of a synagogue. On view is the massive Esslingen Mahzor (Germany, 1290), a holiday prayer book for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. A page on display depicts the opening words of a liturgical hymn recited on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, enclosed within a Gothic-style monumental arch.

Located at an important nexus in the trade routes that stretched from the Mediterranean to the Far East, Jews have lived in Yemen since antiquity. The exhibition includes a 15th century Yemenite bible, written in a bold, square script on paper, rather than parchment. Decorated with stylized birds and geometric motifs, this manuscript reflects the artist’s adoption of the dominant Islamic visual culture, which eschewed figural art.

Jewish communities in Babylonia and Persia (modern-day Iraq and Iran) engaged with the artistic styles and intellectual traditions of the surrounding Islamic culture. This cultural exchange is evident in manuscripts merging Jewish themes with Persian aesthetics, such as Yusuf and Zulaykha (Iran, 1853), which reimagines the biblical tale of Joseph and the wife of Potiphar. On view in the exhibition are folios showing Joseph being mistreated by his brothers and cast into a pit.

Jewish communities flourished for over a thousand years in the North African region known as the Maghreb, comprising Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. The exhibition features a vividly decorated ketubbah, or marriage contract, from 1847 in which the text is framed within a Moorish arch, a popular motif influenced by the architectural milieu.

Many Sephardi Jews found refuge in the territories of the Ottoman Empire, and marriage contracts in the collection reflect the integration of Jewish ritual with the visual language of Ottoman art. A colorful ketubbah (1830) on view features a popular 19th century style in Constantinople, with crowded vegetation, flowers painted in bright colors without outlines, and gilt borders and inscriptions.

Knowledge of the Jews of Egypt was illuminated by the mid-19th century discovery of a remarkable cache of documents, known as the Cairo Genizah, in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo. A genizah is a repository that holds sacred Jewish texts no longer in use. The Cairo Genizah, however, included anything written in Hebrew letters, sacred or secular—over 400,000 folios spanning more than a millennium of Jewish daily life. The Library of JTS holds the world’s second-largest collection of documents from the Cairo Genizah, and the exhibition showcases a fragment of an 11th century primer that demonstrates how children were taught the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.