Obj. ID: 53977  Mazal Tov, Frankfurt am Main, circa 1725

The following description was prepared by William Gross:

Printed amulets that could serve the purpose of more expensive hand-written talismans began to appear in the late 17th century, continuing into the 18th.  There are not a great many surviving examples, but the majority of those that we today possess are from Germany. The popularity of printed birth amulets in particular is apparent in the number that have originated in Southern Germany, especially from Sulzbach and Fuerth, around which were many rural communities whose Jews believed in the mysteries of practical Kabbalah. Many different varieties of design were printed in the 18th and 19th centuries, although most of them used the same textual elements. These include the invocation of the Patriarchs and their wives, the mention of Lilith with her many different names, the angels Sanoi, Sansanoi, and Samangalaf, the "Shir le-Ma'alot" (Psalm 121), and the story of Eliyahu meeting Lilith. All of these texts are to provide protection for the mother and child.

This example is one of the few German amulets of the 18th century not printed in Fuerth or Sulzbach. Among those amulets, it is probably the earliest, being both dated and placed by the same woodcut zodiac signs that appear in a Minhagim book of Frankfurt d.O. from 1707. Since the woodcuts in that book are more complete than those in the amulet, some of which have missing elements, the date of the amulet is somewhat later. There are a number of different versions of this elaborate amulet preserved in a few collections, with four different versions in the library of the JTS,

In addition to most of the regular texts, this amulet features the depiction of the Kabbalistic six-pointed star inside of which are inscribed names of God and a depiction of the Shiviti menorah composed of the 67th Psalm.