Illuminated Haggadot from Medieval Spain: Biblical Imagery and the Passover Holiday (review)

The Passover Haggadah is one of the most fascinating Jewish books. Although seemingly a small and standard work, telling a well-known and conventional story, the fact is that the abundant editions of this little book, issued in numerous locations and in many languages, contain rich information on various Jewish communities, their ideology, culture, and relationships with the host or neighboring societies. These aspects are revealed to a certain degree by the text of the Haggadah as it evolved over the ages, but even more so in the wealth of illustrations that accompany many copies of Haggadot, whether in manuscript form or printed books. Illuminated Haggadah manuscripts flourished from the late thirteenth century on, and large numbers of colorful and attractive editions continue to appear year after year to this day. In fact, of all the traditional Jewish writings, the Haggadah is the one which has been most often and most lavishly illustrated, occupying a central place in the field of Jewish art.

Among the communities of medieval Europe, the Jews of Spain were apparently those who invested the most effort and cost in producing luxurious and captivating Haggadot. Wealthy Sephardic families commissioned proficient scribes and talented illuminators to create their Haggadot. The lavish manuscripts attest to the great attention these scribes and the artists—and the latter were not necessarily Jews—paid to the physical appearance of the books they created: the layout of each page, the elegant typography, and the rich decorative program. Unlike the Haggadot of other communities, selected Sephardic Haggadot are provided with a set of full-page miniatures, which, in addition to liturgical and textual episodes, narrate in detailed figurative images the stories of the Bible, starting with the Creation. Most well known among these manuscripts are the so-called Golden Haggadah (London, British Library), Sarajevo Haggadah (Sarajevo, National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina), and Rylands Haggadah (Manchester, John Rylands University Library). The rich narrative pictorial biblical cycles in these and a few other related Haggadot—all produced in the Crown of Aragon during the first half of the fourteenth century—constitute the subject of the present book.

Katrin Kogman-Appel, a specialist of medieval Hebrew manuscript illumination, sets out to place the biblical picture cycles of the Sephardic Haggadot in the general framework of medieval, largely Christian, miniature art. She points out the close similarities between the Jewish artistic books and those of their Christian neighbors—not only in the general construction of the cycles and their setting but also in the iconography of individual episodes. While the Jews of Spain generally avoided figural narrative imagery in their Bible manuscripts, the less restrictive atmosphere in which the Haggadah is recited during the festive meal at home was found more appropriate for such pictorial cycles. As Kogman-Appel competently shows, among the models that influenced the images in the Haggadot noteworthy are Latin Psalters from twelfth-to fourteenth-century England and France that are similarly preceded by biblical cycles not directly connected to the main text. Naturally, however, other narrative biblical cycles were common in Christian art since Late Antiquity, and they were available to the artists Haggadot as well. The essential question tackled by the author is, therefore, which cycles and individual images were selected by the Sephardic Haggadah artists, and what was the cultural-intellectual background that inspired their activity when they set to create a new type of artistic Jewish book.

In the first and more substantial part of her book, Kogman-Appel deals with the pictorial sources of the miniatures. Here are discussed in detail the curious relationships between the Jewish cycles and their Christian prototypes. As the Haggadot exhibit different and wide sets of images, it is obvious the sources that were available to the artists were ample and multifaceted. It is thus curious to examine why and what was selected. As in a detective work, the author shows how the biblical...