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Foreword Aside from the Bible, the Passover haggadah is probably the Jewish book most familiar to Jews. It is also, arguably, the single-most beloved Jewish text. As both script for the seder and its main subject, the haggadah has earned an unrivaled place in Jewish culture, both religious and secular. Of all the classic Jewish texts-the Talmud, the Jewish Bible, and the prayer book-the haggadah is the one most "alive" today. Jews continue to rewrite, revise, and add to its text, recasting it so as to maintain the haggadah's relevance to their lives. That proclivity for contemporizing the haggadah can be traced back to the haggadah text itself. In one of its most famous passages, it instructs its reader, the participant in the seder, "to see him or herself as though they had gone out of Egypt." Historically, Jews have fulfilled this instruction in different ways, sometimes even acting out the Exodus by marching around the seder table! Since the early Middle Ages, however, probably the most typical way Jews have made the haggadah speak to their contemporary concerns and needs has been through the act of composing commentaries on it and then drawing on their elaborations and interpretations at the seder. These commentaries have been of every conceivable type-midrashic, legalistic, homiletical, ethical, philosophical, and mystical. And each has added a different and additional layer ofmeaning to the ritual. The most recent type of commentary is the scholarly, critical commentary that traces the historical development of the seder and the haggadah through the ages. This type ofcommentary is itself a product ofhistory; it was born out ofthe rise ofthe modern historical study ofJewish culture that began at the end of the nineteenth century and has since produced the rich body of scholarship known popularly today as Jewish studies. The first such modern attempts at a critical-historical study of the haggadah were made nearly a century ago, and until now the definitive historical commentary on the haggadah has been the edition published by the eminent German-born Israeli scholar E. D. Goldschmidt in 1960. In its time, Goldschmidt's haggadah set a new standard in modern Jewish scholarship. In the years since then, however, there have been many advances, both substantive and methodological, in the study of Jewish classical texts in general and of the haggadah in particular, and these new findings have created a need for a new historical commentary. The present volume by Professor Joseph Tabory, one of the world's leading authorities on the history ofthe haggadah, is a worthy successor to Goldschmidt's work. Although it is in the very nature of all scholarship to eventually be superseded by new discoveries and insights, Tabory's commentary will certainly remain the definitive work on the haggadah for many years to come. Xl IPS COMMENTARY ON THE HAGGADAH Probably more than any other classical Jewish text, the haggadah lends itself to historical commentary. For one thing, it virtually wears its history on its sleeve (or napkin), as it were. Biblical verses, Rabbinic interpretations, medieval hymns, and still more recent passages all mingle in the text. Virtually every historical period and geographical center of Jewish culture is represented in its pages. But its historical character goes deeper than merely a listing of its sources. The haggadah is a book about remembering the past, and the vicissitudes of history touch on virtually every moment in its own development, beginning with the invention of the seder itself. Like most things in Judaism, the roots of the seder go back to the Bible, specifically to the account in the book of Exodus (12-13) of the Passover sacrifice that was offered and eaten on the night before the Israelites left Egypt. The Passover seder as we know it, however, actually originated in late antiquity, in Roman Palestine in the first centuries of the Common Era. That historical context is very important because both the very structure and format of the seder derive from the Greco-Roman banquet and its specific conventions. The haggadah text reflects not only those conventions but also the inevitable changes that occurred when Jews moved from Roman Palestine to other cultures in the Diaspora: first, Babylonia, and later, the European centers known as Ashkenaz and Sepharad-where, among other things, Jews ate and dined in the styles and fashions of their gentile hosts in each separate diasporic culture. Let me give one brief example: The passage that we know as the Four Questions...

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