The Haggadah – a lively look at an ancient tradition

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The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative and Religious Imagination.

Marc Michael Epstein

Last spring the Washington Haggadah, a late 15th-century illuminated manuscript by scribe-artist Joel ben Simeon, appeared in affordable facsimile just in time for Passover.  Such scholarly investigation of both text and imagery of a remarkable, rare illustrated Jewish book serves as prelude to the current volume, which focuses on four earlier illuminated haggadot.  Here Marc Epstein, professor of religion at Vassar College, surveys (in chronological order): the Bird’s Head Haggadah (c. 1300) from central Germany, plus three Catalonian haggadot, all in the British Library--the Golden Haggadah (c. 1320-30), Rylands Haggadah (c. 1330-40), and its so-called Brother Haggadah (c. 1330-40).  The famous Sarajevo Haggadah (after 1350; Catalonia), while related, unfortunately goes unmentioned.

Lavish, decorated haggadot emerged in both Jewish regions, Ashkenaz (Central European) and Sepharad (Iberian), during the later 13th century, leading to these four justly celebrated early examples, produced before persecutions diminished such high-level productions.  The eventual use of printed haggadah texts in Jewish practice was magisterially surveyed in the late Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Haggadah and History (orig ed. 1975; a book curiously omitted from this account of medieval precedents).  Recently Kogman-Appel (Penn State University Press, 2006) analysed the imagery in these same Spanish examples.  So Epstein builds on solid scholarly foundations but advances fresh looking and thinking.  He must be a wonderful leader at his own Passover seder.  

Epstein addresses the imagery thematically, book by book, taking the position that the illuminators had purposeful agency, creating imagery to engage active exegesis on the part of the beholder.  He attempts to discern ‘textual fidelity’ along with ‘elements of exegetical independence and inventiveness’ in the service of a theology.  And he approaches this Jewish imagery from the viewpoint of the full community, a minority constructing its identity in relation to dominant culture through a combination of assimilation and cultural resistance.  Half of the book considers the Bird’s Head Haggadah in the context of a shifting Christian practice that began to emphasize the eucharist and also promulgated notorious cruel legends involving blood libel against contemporary Jews: host desecration, even ritual murder, all surrounding the shared period of Passover and Easter.

Many substantial, revisionist insights emerge.  Epstein convincingly argues that the Bird’s Head Haggadah results from a liberal or lenient, not a pietistic alteration of human faces due to iconophobia.  Also importantly, he contends that these added birds’ heads mark the Jews in distinction to their faceless enemies, whose very erasure and incompleteness reinforces intrinsic Jewish group identity.  He observes a wide variety of dress, especially including the notorious, identifying pointed Jewish hat for adult males, turned from the negative of Christian art into a positive symbol of community cohesion.  He also notes varied social status for the lively, composite (often bearded) bird figures, which he likens to griffins, a positive hybrid blended from noble animals, lion and eagle, in mediaeval bestiaries.  

Such sharp distinctions derive from contemporary relations between the faiths, increasingly fraught and hostile in the crusade-era Ashkenaz region, as Nina Rowe’s new book on Synagoga and Ecclesia allegories (Cambridge University Press, 2011) shows.  Epstein sees the image of bird-headed Jewish insiders as a negotiated community response to its threatened status, and he interprets the unusual, central imagery of matzoh-making as a rejoinder to the Christians’ arguments about their miraculous Eucharist.  Numerous images reinforce Jewish confidence in their own divine protection and grace.  Epstein concludes that this haggadah conveys a subtle, sophisticated insider message as ‘The Book of Redemption.’  

While Catalonia receives briefer analysis than in Kogman-Appel’s book, Epstein builds upon her iconographic (including midrashic) interpretations to pursue again the community agendas of his chosen haggadot.  He sees a subtle layout for the imagery of the Golden Haggadah, composed to be read carefully both sequentially (right to left, like Hebrew) as well as chiasmically, i.e. in crisscross directions.  Scenes that mirror one another create a complex, carefully planned network of parallel scenes and repeated motifs from Genesis and Exodus.  In the full-page reproductions, these juxtapositions emerge clearly and suggest typological connections as well as a grander divine plan for the Jewish people, even when some narratives are presented out of sequence.  He also observes the prominence of women, including ancillary figures, often connected with children (or loss of children), in Golden Haggadah scenes, particularly scenes of rescue, so he theorizes that the manuscript might have been made for a woman.  

While the remaining haggadot have been associated as emerging from the same workshop, Epstein emphasizes their pictorial differences: the ‘Brother’ manuscript, with more Byzantine derivations, preceded the Rylands Haggadah, more Spanish-Latin in execution (unfortunately, Epstein does not comment on the French look of the Golden Haggadah).  Both works stick closer to the biblical text without midrash, but the Ryland Haggadah offers more vengeful, polemical imagery of Egyptian suffering.  Yet beyond such triumphalist sentiments, Epstein further notes that both offer comparable representation of Hebrews and Egyptians, to suggest a more confident Jewish community, peers with Christians in contemporary Catalonia.  

Epstein’s lively, learned investigations (often amplified in his notes) will surely fascinate mediaevalists as well as anyone interested in Jewish visual culture, although non-academics will surely find some of his recondite language (e.g. ‘metahistory,’ ‘titration,’ ‘avulsion’) opaque.  In a final chapter he revises prevailing wisdom, especially that these books derive from Christian models, except when adapted to put a Jewish advantage on an original instance for any borrowed imagery, especially in Christian typology. (He does make one mistake, claiming ‘barrenness of the line of Jesus,’ without acknowledging the popular late medieval trope of the Holy Kinship.) A learned use of Rashi’s commentary on Exodus informs one Messianic interpretation in accord with haggadah imagery and its claims of Jewish redemption, past and future (using the Washington Haggadah for figure 85).   

Both his rich sense of context and his original, persuasive, sometime revisionist interpretations will make Epstein’s book an enduring touchstone for these important manuscripts, which are beautifully reproduced as full pages in this affordable volume.  In the process, as a rabbi of the visual, Epstein successfully restores these monuments to their rightful position within Jewish cultural history.

The Medieval Haggadah:Art, Narrative and Religious Imagination by Marc Michael Epstein is published by Yale University Press, 2011. 324 pp. 61 plates, 86 colour illus, $65.00. ISBN 978-0-300-15666-9.