Historic haggadahs offer ‘snapshot’ of Passovers past
National Library displayed a selection from the world’s largest collection of seder texts; here are a few in case you missed it
Ilan Ben Zion is an AFP reporter and a former news editor at The Times of Israel.
Brawny, sword-brandishing Maccabees and nude Israelite slaves aren’t your typical Seder accompaniment. Nor are agnostic prayers for protection from a deity of one’s ancestors.
Composed in 1944, the Jewish Brigade Haggadah’s traditional text is embellished with unconventional passages that reflect the “New Jew” ethos of the Zionist pioneers who joined the British to fight Nazi Germany. It’s one of nearly 10,000 haggadahs in the National Library of Israel’s collection — the world’s largest — a handful of which went on display Monday night as part of a festival celebrating liturgical poems about Zion.
The secularism, passionate nationalism and determination to take up arms define not only the drawings that decorate the Jewish Brigade Hagaddah’s pages, but also the text itself, which is also definitively Israeli.
“And the Lord in the heavens, who heard the prayers of my forefathers, and gave them strength and courage to bear and suffer every hardship and disgrace and evil in the world, and hope for salvation, perhaps will hear my prayers, too, my groans will gather, and be my protector,” reads one passage from the soldiers’ text.
The Haggadah, the text recited during the seder meal on Passover, tells the story of the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt and is a cornerstone of Jewish liturgy. Unlike a Torah scroll, Jewish tradition allows enormous room for creative expression in the Haggadah manuscript, as it was compiled over the course of centuries.
The result, said Dr. Yoel Finkelman, Judaica curator at the National Library, was a constant injection of personality: through the images and added passages each hagaddah offers a “snapshot” of a community at a given time.
“I think that part of the magic of the Haggadah is that there’s this core that’s basically 1,000-plus years old and in every community there’s this constant need to update, to express something about the values of the community,” he said. that stems, perhaps, from the passage in the Haggadah exhorting every Jew “in every generation… [to] see himself as if he has gone out of Egypt.”
In a climate-controlled room at the library, on Hebrew University’s Givat Ram campus, Finkelman extracted some of the institution’s oldest and most unique haggadahs from a box. The library’s collection ranges from fragments of the oldest known haggadah — a few tattered pieces of 12th-century parchment from the Cairo Geniza — to modern editions in languages as diverse as Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Ladino, Greek, and Marathi.
The library also possesses the first edition of the Haggadah translated into a foreign language — Latin — from 1512, and a second-edition copy of the first translation into English, from 1787. Many of the manuscripts have already been digitized in high resolution and uploaded to the National Library’s website as part of its initiative to create a digital catalog of its collection.
Among the highlights of the collection are handwritten Medieval copies of the Passover liturgy whose writers illuminated their pages with magnificent drawings. The Wolff Haggadah, a 14th century book from France, was stolen by the Nazis, ended up in Warsaw and was later donated to the National Library by the Polish government.
Its pages, like many of the haggadahs in the collection, bear marks of use — annotations in the margins and faded red splotches where inebriated Seder participants spilled their wine. Rubricated words are surrounded by brilliant floral patterns, and prototypically medieval-looking people inhabit the margins of the text, holding bitter herbs and matzot.
The Rothschild Haggadah, a 15th-century illuminated manuscript, perhaps the most impressive in the collection, was also confiscated by Nazi Germany. According to the library, “After the war it was purchased by Dr. Fred Murphy, a graduate of Yale University, who bequeathed it to the University in 1948. In 1980 the Haggadah was identified as the property of the Rothschild family and returned to its owners, who donated it to the National Library.”
Its people and buildings reflect Medieval styles of dress and architecture.
The nondescript, coarse beige paper of the Guadalajara Haggadah bears crude imprints of Hebrew letters, like a hastily printed pamphlet or flyer. Inelegant as its unadorned pages and simple font may seem, the 1480 text is remarkable for being the first-ever Passover text made by printing press.
Printed just 12 years before the Spanish Inquisition and Expulsion, the Guadalajara Haggadah is one of just a handful that survived the catastrophe marking the end of the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry.
“Much of the Hebrew incunabula from Spain just didn’t survive,” Finkelman said, referring to the earliest printed books by their technical name. “We have some, but nearly as much as Italy.”
Such haggadahs are not just works of art, they’re labors of love, he said.
“If you think about the person who commissioned the Woolf Haggadah, or some of [the other illuminated manuscripts] — they’re spending a fortune. You don’t spend that kind of money for nothing,” said Finkelman. “You do it because this is something that really matters to you. This is a ritual you really care about.”
