Glückel of Hameln left behind a memoir—one of the few extant writings by a woman of the period—-that provides us with a picture both of seventeenth-century German-Jewish society and of the inner world of a woman of her place and time. The first translation of the Old Yiddish text was done by a relative of Glückel’s, Bertha Pappenheim, who also posed as Glückel for the portrait depicted here, painted by the artist Leopold Pilichowski (1869–1933).

Institution: Alice and Moshe Shalvi, Jerusalem