Jewish History (2013) 27: 91–94 DOI: 10.1007/s10835-012-9178-y

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative, and Religious Imagination. By Marc Michael Epstein. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. Pp. 344. $65.00. ISBN: 9780300156669. SARA OFFENBERG Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheva, Israel E-mail: [email protected]

Marc Michael Epstein’s book is an original and important piece of research. The work is divided into three parts and totals ten chapters. It contains beautiful reproductions of four haggadot that have not been printed to date in such high-quality versions (with the exception of the facsimile editions): the Birds’ Head Haggadah, the Golden Haggadah, the Rylands Haggadah, and the so-called Brother Haggadah. Epstein discusses most of the aspects relevant to the production of the medieval haggadah, such as Passover rites, Jewish-Christian relations at the time the manuscript was ordered, gender, and education. The work is written from an art history perspective, in a style reminiscent of a mystery novel. Epstein’s book adds important insight into the study of the medieval haggadah, as he dedicates about a third of it to the Birds’ Head Haggadah, one of the best-known Hebrew illuminated manuscripts. This Ashkenazi Haggadah is mainly renowned for its zoomorphic birds’ heads, which replace most of the human faces. With his fluent prose and witty subchapter titles, the author offers a fascinating and convincing explanation of this mysterious phenomenon. What we are observing in the Birds’ Head Haggadah, Epstein explains, are not exactly birds, but rather griffins—hybrid creatures that combine the features of an eagle and a lion. Epstein connects these creatures with the engraved lions and eagles on the Tabernacle curtain, following sources such as Jerusalem Talmud Shekalim 8:3 and Rashi’s commentary on it, and providing parallels from other Ashkenazi illuminated manuscripts. After deciphering the nature of the creatures in question, the author turns to the meaning of the figures portrayed with these faces— that is, the Israelites—and distinguishes them from the blank faces of the Egyptians, the angels, the sun, and the moon. Taking into consideration

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the significance of the griffin, Epstein concludes that the Israelites are endowed with elevated spiritual natures, even higher than those of the angels. The distinction between the faces of the characters has been noticed by previous scholars, such as Zofia Ameisenowa and Bezalel Narkiss. But the novelty of Epstein’s work lies in his identifying the two persons with birds’ heads who are among the Egyptian group though not part of them, a discovery the author credits to his son Misha, who identified these characters as Datan and Aviram. According to this suggestion, the earlier claim that not only the Israelites but also the Egyptians are portrayed with birds’ heads can no longer be sustained. The author correctly discusses the reason for zoomorphic birds’ heads as relevant only for this manuscript, with the awareness that this phenomenon should be studied in each manuscript individually: “One of the failures of imagination on the part of most studies of the phenomenon in Jewish visual culture is that investigators feel compelled to attempt to impose a single solution upon the problem of the entire genre. . . . I am skeptical as to whether one key will suffice for all the occurrences of zoocephalic figures” (73). It should be mentioned that Zsofia Buda also followed this line when studying the women’s zoomorphic heads in the Tripartite Mahzor (“Animals and Gazing at Women: Zoocephalic Figures in the Tripartite Mahzor,” in Animal Diversities, ed. Gerhard Jaritz and Alice Choyke [Krems, 2005], 136– 64). The Medieval Haggadah takes its place alongside other in-depth pioneering works on the Spanish haggadot, such as Katrin Kogman-Appel’s Illuminated Haggadot from Medieval Spain (University Park, PA, 2006). Beginning with a discussion on the Golden Haggadah, the author distinguishes his work by stating that he is interested in the possible meaning of the scenes, and he takes upon himself a challenging task, “to titrate the particular ideological, theological, philosophical, historiosophical, political, or social agendas of the authorship of the manuscript from its iconography. I will do this by considering the meaning of the midrashic elements” (150). In the same breath, he expresses some caution regarding his reading of the images and emphasizes that his intention is merely to suggest a set of possible readings of the manuscript. The illustrations on fols. 2v-15r are displayed in four squares on each folio, and Epstein suggests reading the sequence as a whole, with regard to the entire iconographic plan. He makes a rather bold move by challenging the conventional reading of the scenes, from right to left and from top to bottom, and by suggesting the addition of another reading in all directions and chiasmically as well. He provides the reader a diagram with arrows based on this idea, demonstrated on fols. 2v-3r of the Golden Haggadah (plate 41). The

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author seeks to decipher the meaning of the images by using this methodology. In the last section of chapter 7 Epstein addresses the gestures of Moses and (mainly) Pharaoh in the plague scenes. In the section from pages 172 to 174, the author offers an interesting comparison between the two seated figures of Pharaoh on fols. 10v and 11r of the Golden Haggadah. He pays much attention to the way in which Pharaoh is seated, with his legs one above the other. It should be mentioned that this is in line with Judith Golden’s research on Christian portrayals of authority (“The Iconography of Authority in the Depiction of Seated, Cross-Legged Figures,” in Between the Picture and the Word: Manuscript Studies from the Index of Christian Art, ed. Colum Hourihane [Princeton, NJ, 2005], 8:81-99). The Golden Haggadah is an illuminated manuscript based on Christian iconography with some deliberate changes, as studied at length by Kogman-Appel. Epstein offers a high level of attention to detail within the scenes and alerts the reader to the clues that guide the viewer when the composition differs from one manuscript to another. This attention to detail is very evident in chapter 8, where the author discusses the forty-six prominent depictions of women in the Golden Haggadah and “their importance to the authorship” (181). In a way, these scenes reveal the owner’s gender. The author is interested not only in the original owner but also in a later owner and the inscription written on the title page that was added in 1602. In contrast to Narkiss, Epstein understands and translates the inscription as a book being given by a woman to a man: “It was given . . . as a gift [by] . . . Mistress Rosa to . . . (her father’s) son-in-law Elia” (191). Epstein occasionally advances interpretations that appear implausible, even in his own estimation; this has the effect of making other ideas he raises seem more plausible. On one page he wonders about the Golden Haggadah: “Would it be too farfetched to imagine that it was commissioned by or for one of Rosa Gallico’s ancestors and passed down from mother to daughter until the Gallico-Rava wedding?” (191). On the following page, he admits that even if the manuscript was commissioned for a woman, as he suggests, we should be careful about drawing such conclusions based on a much later owner. The ninth chapter focuses on the differences between the Rylands Haggadah and the so-called Brother Haggadah (London, British Library, MS BL Or. 1404). In a careful analysis of the minor differences between the two manuscripts, Epstein draws the conclusion that in the Rylands Haggadah there is “a rather bloodthirsty, vengeful attitude with regard to the Egyptians—which presents a striking contrast with the measured and even empathic ethos of BL Or. 1404” (228–29). In the final chapter, the author uses minor dissimilarities between these haggadot to shed light on certain scenes,

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such as Zipporah circumcising her son; this analysis is brought alongside a discussion of the dialogue with, and the iconographic borrowing from, Christian art. A minor drawback of the book is a slight imbalance in the treatment of the texts; in comparison to the extensive discussion of the Birds’ Head Haggadah and the Golden Haggadah, the last two haggadot receive significantly less attention. These shortcomings notwithstanding, Epstein’s book offers many new and valuable insights.