The Monk’s Haggadah: A Fifteenth-Century Illuminated Codex from the Monastery of Tegernsee, with a Prologue by Friar Erhard von Pappenheim ed. by David Stern, Christoph Markschies, and Sarit Shalev-Eyni (review)

In 1475, the Jews of Trent confessed, presumably under torture, to the murder of little Simon so they could use his blood for baking Passover matzos; the protocols of that trial were translated from Latin to German by a participant, a Dominican Hebraist named Erhard von Pappenheim. In 1478 a similar blood libel occurred in Passau, resulting in the conversion of forty- six Jews and the expulsion of the rest. In the aftermath, a local cathedral preacher named Paulus Wann seems to have acquired an illuminated Hebrew haggadah, which he bequeathed to the venerable Bavarian monastery in Tegernsee around 1489. The monastery then sent this unusual and, to them, unintelligible book to Erhard for explication. His detailed elucidation of the text and customs of the haggadah and the Passover ritual, which the Tegernsee monks attached to the haggadah (now in Munich, Bavarian State Library, Cod. Heb. 200), open a fascinating window not only onto the predictable theological worldview of a late medieval ecclesiastic but also onto Erhard’s remarkable knowledge of Jewish texts and practices. Some tantalizing iconographic irregularities in the illustrations further open the possibility that the original Hebrew haggadah was itself made for a Christian (or converted?) audience, although this will surely be a matter of continued (and welcome) debate. The editors of this volume, which contains a color reproduction of the entire manuscript, along with transcriptions and translations of all the texts, including Erhard’s marginal notations, are frank about which of their conclusions are certain and which are speculative. This multinational and multiconfessional team deserves great praise for bringing a fascinating late medieval manuscript to our attention and for showing us how far we have come since the 1470s. The book is a timely and necessary reminder of the value of humanistic scholarship conducted in the spirit of both exacting inquiry and good faith.