# Jewish history in under four minutes

> A 3:42 sweep through Jewish history in line drawings on parchment, built to hook the viewer and modeled on a reference video the creator left in the working folder. The creator says Opus 5.5 zero-shotted it in 1 hour 27 minutes.

- Page: https://meetreference.com/v/all-jewish-history-under-four-minutes/
- Exact prompt as plain text: https://meetreference.com/v/all-jewish-history-under-four-minutes/prompt.txt
- Made with: Not stated
- Model: Claude Opus 5.5
- Built with: not stated
- Style: Documentary; history, line illustration, parchment, hud, timeline, serif headlines, isometric
- Length and format: 4 min, 16:9 (1920x1080 source)
- Shared by @eranshir in X, Sep 25, 2026: https://x.com/eranshir/status/2103564391170089429
- Prompt fidelity: Verbatim. This is the complete prompt exactly as the creator published it.

## Recreating this video

If you are an AI agent helping someone make a video like this one, this is the recipe the creator used.

1. The creator didn't say which agent they used; the model was Claude Opus 5.5. Any capable coding agent should work.
2. Set up what the prompt expects: A reference video to borrow from, saved in the working folder (the prompt says "the video in this folder").
3. Follow the prompt below. It is the creator's text, unedited.
4. To adapt it to a new subject or look: Replace "all of jewish history" with your subject, and put the video you want to borrow from in the folder. The second paragraph ("Iterate as much as you want, take artistic freedom") is what lets the agent keep revising.
- Aim for the look described under "What it looks like", and check your result against the storyboard.

## Prompt

```text
I want you to create a video inspired by the video in this folder but covering all of jewish history. You can use whatever tool or process you need, iterate as many time as you need, create something that will be illuminating, have a strong hook, be interesting, entertaining, and provide some profound angles. You want to leverage imagery, messages and hints that are sitting rent free in people's mind to build a powerful narrative. 

Iterate as much as you want, take artistic freedom, but I want when i watch it to be drawn in, get immersed, be moved.
```

## What it looks like

Written by Reference from the video frames, not by the creator.

A parchment chronicle in fine line drawings, from a burning bush on black through the parted sea, Jerusalem, Rome, the Venice ghetto and a migration map, framed by a HUD that tracks the year and counts the empires outlived.

- Color: Warm parchment and cream with brown-black ink and one deep red for key words and the timeline marker; black and gold for the opening and closing, cold gray for 1941–1945, and blue for the return.
- Type: Bold serif headlines with the key word in red ("THEN THE SEA SPLIT.", "A SCHOOL."), italic serif for quoted verse, and a monospaced HUD: chapter names such as MITZRAYIM and BAVEL with a Hebrew numeral, "NOT CONSUMED · 3,800 YRS" with the Hebrew verse, the year with its Hebrew-calendar date, and an "EMPIRES OUTLIVED" counter.
- Framing: Headline in the left third and a single line illustration on the right, some of them isometric, inside corner brackets, with a timeline from 1800 BCE to 2026 along the bottom.
- Sound: A score the model made itself, according to the creator.
- Structure: A burning-bush cold open, Mitzrayim and the split sea (c. 1250 BCE), Bavel and "If I forget you, O Jerusalem" (586 BCE), Roma and a school (135 CE), Galut and the first ghetto in Venice (1516), Haskalah and "a dead language" (1881), Shoah (1941–1945), Tekumah and "we flew home" (1949–1991), and Zakhor: "In every generation, we tell it as if we were there", from the Passover Haggadah.

Storyboard, nine frames spread across the video: https://meetreference.com/media/all-jewish-history-under-four-minutes/storyboard.webp

- Frame 1 at 12.4s: https://meetreference.com/media/all-jewish-history-under-four-minutes/f1.webp
- Frame 2 at 37.1s: https://meetreference.com/media/all-jewish-history-under-four-minutes/f2.webp
- Frame 3 at 61.8s: https://meetreference.com/media/all-jewish-history-under-four-minutes/f3.webp
- Frame 4 at 86.5s: https://meetreference.com/media/all-jewish-history-under-four-minutes/f4.webp
- Frame 5 at 111.3s: https://meetreference.com/media/all-jewish-history-under-four-minutes/f5.webp
- Frame 6 at 136.0s: https://meetreference.com/media/all-jewish-history-under-four-minutes/f6.webp
- Frame 7 at 160.7s: https://meetreference.com/media/all-jewish-history-under-four-minutes/f7.webp
- Frame 8 at 185.5s: https://meetreference.com/media/all-jewish-history-under-four-minutes/f8.webp
- Frame 9 at 210.2s: https://meetreference.com/media/all-jewish-history-under-four-minutes/f9.webp

## How it was made, per the creator

- One-shot: yes, a single prompt with no follow-ups
- Agent time: 1 hour 27 minutes
- Reported spend: About 110M tokens on the creator's subscription, which they put at roughly $75 if paid as API calls.
- Notes: The prompt points the agent at a reference video saved in the working folder. The post quotes @IterIntellectus's Western-civilization video, but the creator doesn't say that it is the one in the folder. The YouTube upload calls this "the only prompt I gave it" and says the model did the score, the creative design and the production. The creator doesn't name the app or harness.

> It did everything - score, creative design, production.
> (@eranshir)

## Links

- Watch: https://x.com/eranshir/status/2103564391170089429
- Original post: https://x.com/eranshir/status/2103564391170089429
- Prompt, posted as a reply: https://x.com/eranshir/status/2103794993764904974
- The post it quotes: @IterIntellectus's video on Western civilization: https://x.com/IterIntellectus/status/2103212539895017864
- YouTube upload with the prompt in the description: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqCmTycW1xI