Obj. ID: 55734
  Sacred and Ritual  Shiviti, Baghdad, circa 1925

The following description was prepared by William Gross:

The Shiviti plaque takes its name from a phrase in the Psalms, "Shivit Adonai Lenegdi Tamid". "I will always hold the Lord before me."  During morning prayers the 67th psalm is read as a part of the liturgy. The making of such visual pages to augment the reading started almost 500 years ago. It began because of a particular story or legend. The custom relates that if one gazes on the form of the Menorah while reciting the Psalm, or reads the psalm written in the form of a Menorah, the person is carried back to the Temple, standing before the golden Temple Menorah itself. To complete the illusion, some of the Temple implements were often illustrated. The mysticism of the idea is clear, and the Shiviti page is often filled with Kabbalistic abbreviations as well as the Menorah form. Sometimes, depending on the size and complexity of the image, other texts read during the time of prayer are also presented on the sheet.

Such pages appear as small sheets to be inserted into a prayer book and taken out when the psalm is recited or as large pages to be hung on the wall of the synagogue for viewing by the whole congregation. The sheet was also used on the wall of a home or Sukkah. Later still, the Shiviti could be printed in the prayer book or painted on the wall of the synagogue. There are numerous examples of both the prayer book tradition and the wall plaque tradition in the Gross Family Collection.

In Iraq, the custom existed of awarding such printed pages, both Shiviti and Amulet, to good students, as is so indicated at the bottom of the page with space left for the name of the recipient to be inscribed.  A number of such examples are in the Gross Family Collection in both the categories of amulet and shiviti. This sheet is printed in gold ink and contains many different textual elements below the large woodcut of the tetragrammaton at the top. The exact same imprint of the large lettered tetragrammaton is present on another such page printed in black ink. One can assume that they were printed by the same publisher, named at the bottom of this page. A handwritten Hebrew date, corresponding to 1925, is written below and probably indicates the date of printing.

In addition to the intended use as an Amulet/Shiviti, this sheet contains the blessing for kindling the lights of Chanukah. This would seem to be a local custom as the same combination exists in another graphically different amulet, 027.011.748.