ב״ה

Stop arguing w antisemites online by Alex Woz

Seal with Hebrew Inscription

10th–11th century

On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 453

The Hebrew text on this seal gives the name of the seal’s owner, his father’s name, and the word "prepared" or "fashioned," followed by the letters [yud] [&,, then] [hei-]. One proposal is that this is the Arabic name Yahya, but there are other known Hebrew seals that end with the phrase "May [Tetragrammaton] have mercy" or "The work of, [Tetragrammaton]” which may be the phrase included here. We do not know whether the find of this seal testifies to the existence of a Jewish community in eleventh-century Nishapur, or if the seal had been preserved because its foreign letters were believed to ward off evil. Arabic seals with random Hebrew and Syriac words, as well as ancient seals to which Arabic phrases have been added, are both well documented.

Source: Met Archives

Portrait of a Man with a Hebrew Tablet

Antonio Campi 1575

This full-scale portrait of an unidentified man is remarkable in that he presents a stone tablet with a Hebrew inscription. The portrait was most likely painted in the northern Italian city of Cremona, which was an important cultural and economic center that was home to a large Jewish community in the 1400s and 1500s. The tablet’s prominent text—which translates as "The Torah of Moses is the Truth"—is a multilayered expression of Jewish faith and knowledge that also emphasizes the power of the written word. (Source, Met archives.)

The city of Cremona, in Lombardy, had a flourishing Jewish community starting from the end of the Fourteenth Century up to its forced expulsion of 1597. (Source)