✦ Published portraits
Kaifeng
Jews in Song-dynasty China, building synagogues in the style of Confucian temples and writing Hebrew prayers with a calligrapher's brush - every note still recognisably ours.
Read the portrait →Cochin
Jews on the Malabar coast holding copper-plate privileges from a Hindu king, singing women's songs in Judeo-Malayalam, and keeping Shabbat with coconut oil in willow-pattern lamps.
Read the portrait →Bene Israel
On the Konkan coast of Maharashtra, a Jewish community pressed oil, kept Shabbat, and called on Elijah the Prophet at every turn of life. Nobody pressed oil on Saturday. Everyone knew why.
Read the portrait →Beta Israel
In the Ethiopian highlands, a Jewish community kept the Orit, climbed mountains for Sigd, and held the covenant in Ge'ez for over a millennium — the same story, in a different key.
Read the portrait →Bukhara
On the Silk Road, Jewish dyers and merchants kept Torah in Persian verse — and carried their striped robes across two millennia to Queens, New York.
Read the portrait →Djerba
On a Tunisian island, one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world still lights Shabbat candles — and still draws tens of thousands of pilgrims to the El-Ghriba synagogue each year.
Read the portrait →Mountain Jews
In the high villages of the eastern Caucasus, a Jewish community kept Shabbat, carried weapons, and spoke an ancient Iranian language — the sword and the Shabbat candle in the same hand.
Read the portrait →The Romaniotes
The oldest Jewish community in Europe: Greek-speaking, older than Christianity in Greece, still praying in their own rite — and still here.
Read the portrait →The Jews of Yemen
Among the most ancient and self-contained Jewish communities ever known — the Teimanim preserved a language, a liturgy, a craft, and a poetry tradition entirely their own.
Read the portrait →The ShUM Cities
Speyer, Worms and Mainz - the Rhineland communities that wrote the rulebook of Ashkenaz, and whose medieval stones still stand on the river.
Read the portrait →The Pale of Settlement
Confined to a western strip of the Russian Empire and teeming with life anyway - the Yiddish civilisation that seeded New York, Tel Aviv and everywhere else.
Read the portrait →Salonika
A port so Jewish the docks shut for Shabbat - the great Ladino-speaking Sephardi city that 1492 built on the Aegean, and kept for four centuries.
Read the portrait →Baghdad
Twenty-six centuries by the rivers - the oldest unbroken diaspora, from the academies that made the Talmud to the Sassoon merchants of the East.
Read the portrait →The Portuguese Nation
Conversos who had lived as Christians for generations crossed a continent to Amsterdam - and there became Jews again, in the open, building a Dutch Jerusalem.
Read the portrait →The Lower East Side
A few downtown Manhattan blocks took in the eastern European tide - tenements, pushcarts, the Yiddish press and the garment trade - and turned it into a recognisably American Jewish world.
Read the portrait →Livorno: The Free Port
A Tuscan free port where the Medici charters let Sephardi exiles, many of them former conversos, live openly as Jews, trade across the Mediterranean and print Hebrew books.
Read the portrait →Tetouan: The Little Jerusalem of Morocco
Tetouan kept Iberian Sephardi memory alive in Moroccan streets, prayers and trade routes - and in the warm, sharp cadences of Haketia.
Read the portrait →Curaçao: The Mother Community of the Americas
An offshoot of Amsterdam's Portuguese Nation, Curaçao's sand-floored synagogue became the mother community of Jewish life across the Americas.
Read the portrait →The Jews of Georgia
By their own count twenty-six centuries in the Caucasus - a Georgian-Jewish world known for an unusually long peace with its Christian neighbours.
Read the portrait →Moisés Ville: Jews on the Pampas
Yiddish-speaking refugees became gauchos on the Argentine pampas - the colony that helped seed a whole South American Jewish world.
Read the portrait →