VIVIAN B. MANN Jewish Theological Seminary OBSERVATIONS ON THE BIBLICAL MINIATURES IN SPANISH HAGGADOT Abstract the seder itself. Illuminated borders and word pan- This essay discusses the last two centuries of medieval Spanish art, els completed the program of illumination. and demonstrates that cooperative relations existed between Christians In all, there remain some seven haggadot from and Jews who worked either independently or together to create art Spain produced from ca. 1300 to ca. 1360 in the both for the Church and the Jewish community. Artists of different Crown of Aragon and Castile in which biblical faiths worked together in ateliers such as that headed by Ferrer Bassa miniatures precede the text of the haggadah. In an (d. 1348), producing both retablos (altarpieces) as well as Latin additional example, the Barcelona Haggadah (British and Hebrew manuscripts. Library, Add. 14761), the biblical scenes serve as The work of such mixed ateliers is of great signicance when text illustrations.3 The number and contents of these considering the genesis ca. 1300 of illuminated with haggadot illustrations are not uniform. The Hispano-Moresque prefatory biblical cycles and genre scenes that were produced in Spain until ca. 1360. These service books for Passover have Haggadah (British Library, Or. 2737), the Rylands always been viewed as a unique phenomenon within the Jewish art (Rylands Library, JRL Heb. 6), and its related of Spain, their origins inexplicable. When the biblical scenes, brother manuscript (British Library, Or. 1404) however, are viewed in the context of contemporaneous Spanish art adhere most closely to the text of the haggadah for the Church, their sources become more transparent. since their miniatures are based solely on the book of Exodus, while the illustrations in the Sarajevo We now know that the haggadah, the service book Haggadah (Sarajevo, National Museum), as well as for the Passover seder, became an independent the Golden Haggadah (British Library, Add. 27010) codex—no longer always attached to a prayer and its sister manuscript (British Library, Or. 8448) book—around the year 1000.1 Three centuries later, begin with the Creation described in Genesis. The it was transformed again. In this second reformula- most extensive biblical cycle is in the Sarajevo tion, which took place in both Ashkenaz and Spain, Haggadah; it begins with Creation and ends with the haggadah became a lavishly illuminated manu- the Death of Moses. Two haggadot with a limited script. This paper concentrates on the Spanish number of biblical illustrations, the Prato (Library examples produced during the fourteenth century, of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Mic. 9478) and largely in Barcelona and the region surrounding it. a partial manuscript in Bologna (Biblioteca Univer- These haggadot were decorated with text illustrations, sitaria, Ms. 2559)4 are related iconographically to such as the Drinking of the Four Cups of Wine, the illuminations of the Sarajevo Haggadah. There and with the symbols of ritual foods like the matzah may have been similar manuscripts that were lost and bitter herbs,2 and were often furnished with in the upheaval of the Expulsion from Spain in 1492 prefatory biblical scenes that range from the Creation or the Expulsion from Portugal in 1496/7 (where to the Death of Moses, and with genre scenes show- Spanish Jews had found a temporary refuge). ing preparations for the Passover holiday as well as Manuscripts were virtually the only artistic genre 1 For the earliest haggadot manuscripts, see Jay Rovner, “An Fragments of the Haggadah,” Jewish Quarterly Review 10 (1898): Early Passover Hagaddah according to the Palestinian Rite,” 381. Jewish Quarterly Review, 3–4 (2000): 337–96. I want to thank Dr. 3 Bezalel Narkiss, Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts in the British Rovner for answering my questions pertaining to the earliest Isles, vol. 1, Spanish and Portuguese Manuscripts (New York: Oxford haggadot. University Press, 1982), gs. 230–235, 239. 2 Representations of the symbolic foods eaten at the seder 4 The second half of the Bologna manuscript is in Modena appear in eleventh-century haggadot, but are isolated illustrations. (Biblioteca Estense, cod. A–K. 1-22-Or. 92). This haggadah is For examples, see David Kaufmann, “Notes to the Egyptian part of a ma4zor, a prayer book for holy days. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 IMAGES 4 Also available online – brill.nl/ima DOI: 10.1163/187180010X547602 Compiled by the Faculty Action Network IMA 4_1-17_f2.indd 1 2/8/2011 6:01:01 PM 2 vivian b. mann that the Jews of Spain were allowed to carry with ance of richly illuminated haggadot ca. 1300 with them into exile.5 All works in precious metals were their extensive cycles of biblical and genre scenes. conscated; even synagogue textiles woven or One would expect such lavishly decorated manu- embroidered with silver and gold were seized and scripts to be preceded by tentative experiments with burned to extract their bullion.6 only a few miniatures, but that is not the case. The Popular literature, like the recent novel recount- illuminated haggadot from fourteenth-century Spain ing a “history” of the Sarajevo Haggadah,7 has appear complete with three types of miniatures and made the public aware that medieval manuscripts text decoration, as if “sprung full-blown from the may suddenly appear. Those made for private use head of Olympian Zeus.”11 Art historians have given are generally small works of art. The reappear- various explanations to the sudden appearance of ance of the Sarajevo Haggadah in the nineteenth this new type of manuscript. One approach empha- century, brought to Hebrew school by a young boy, sizes the fact that the biblical and genre miniatures inspired the writing of the rst monograph on of the haggadot precede the text and are not inte- Jewish art in 1898 by the eminent art historians grated with it, as is also the case with Books of Hours David Heinrich Müller and Julius von Schlosser, and Psalms, or manuscripts that contain both Hours with an additional essay by the collector and bib- and Psalms.12 Although the placement of the min- liophile David Kaufmann.8 Their study was the rst iatures in both the haggadot and the Latin prayer to consider a work of Jewish art from an art his- books is the same, and the latter may have inspired torical perspective, although the text was not devoid the positioning of the former, their content is very of the prejudices of its writers.9 Since the Sarajevo different. The prefatory biblical scenes in Books of Haggadah became known, there have been no other Hours and Psalms also include individualized sub- “miraculous” discoveries of hitherto unknown illu- jects according to the history and religious preferences minated Sephardi manuscripts. Recently, Spanish of the patron or recipient, while the themes of the and Italian conservators have begun the painstak- haggadot illustrations are universal. In Spain, a Book ing process of retrieving lost pages by exploring of Hours was written for Ferdinand I of Léon and book bindings made of folios of medieval Hebrew Castile in the eleventh century that included prefa- manuscripts. These investigations have yielded tory miniatures (Santiago de Compostela, University some illuminated pages and marginalia, although Library, Res.1). Ferrer Bassa (d. 1348), head of an not entire manuscripts.10 To understand the biblical atelier that produced Latin texts as well as Hebrew miniatures in the Spanish haggadot, we are conned books—such as Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed to seven fourteenth-century manuscripts and to (Copenhagen, Koniglege Bibliothek, Hebr. XXXVII) works related to them. and a medical treatise in Hebrew (Paris, Bibliothèque The major question treated in previous literature nationale, Hébreu 1203)13—created a Book of Hours is the identication of “related works,” whose study for Mary of Navarre, wife of Pedro IV, between would allow an understanding of the sudden appear- 1338 and 1342. Ferrer was also responsible for 5 The number of manuscripts carried into exile is a matter Sarajevo, Wischnitzer in Weimar: The Politics of Writing about of dispute among scholars. Gabrielle Sed-Rajna noted that very Medieval Jewish Art,” in Eva Fromovicj, ed., Imagining the Self, few Hebrew manuscripts remain on the Iberian peninsula; Imagining the Other: Visual Representation and Jewish-Christian Dynamics in therefore most must have been carried into exile. “Hebrew the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 8–19. Illuminated Manuscripts from the Iberian Peninsula,” in Vivian 10 For an account of this research, see Fragments from the “Italian B. Mann et al, eds., Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Genizah,” an Exhibition ( Jerusalem: Jewish National and University Medieval Spain (New York: George Braziller, 1992), 133. Library, 1999). Among the works published is a marginal depic- 6 Henry Kamen, “Toward Expulsion,” in Elie Kedourie, ed., tion of David and Goliath, as well as illuminated word panels. Spain and the Jews: The Sephardi Experience, 1492 and After (London: The manuscripts stem from all over the Jewish world, including Thames and Hudson, 1992), 71. Spain. 7 Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book: A Novel (New York: 11 Aeschylus, Eumenides. Viking, 2008). 12 This approach is taken by Michael Batterman, “The 8 David Heinrich Müller and Julius von Schlosser, with an Emergence of the Spanish Illuminated Haggadah Manuscript” appendix by David Kaufmann, Die Haggadah von Sarajevo: Eine (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 2000). spanisch-jüdische Bilderhandschrift des Mittelalters (Vienna, 1898). 13 Gabrielle Sed-Rajna, “Hebrew Manuscripts of Fourteenth- 9 For a critical view of the rst publication on the Sarajevo Century Catalonia and the Workshop of the Master of St. Mark,” Haggadah, see Eva Fromovicj, “Buber in Basel, Schlosser in Jewish Art 18 (1992): 117–128. Compiled by the Faculty Action Network IMA 4_1-17_f2.indd 2 2/8/2011 6:01:01 PM observations on the biblical miniatures in spanish HAGGADOT 3 completing the decoration of the Anglo-Catalan within a building and Abraham serves the three Psalter (Biblio-thèque nationale, Lat.