The history of Easter, as Paul Bradshaw’s opening essay indicates, can most easily be charted as an exercise in plotting the parameters of sacred time. That has not been the case with the parallel Jewish instance of Passover. To be sure, the Passover season attracted its preparatory period and its aftermath (and these are chronicled in volume 6 of this series), but the predominant focus of Passover celebration remained the festive family meal with which the festival begins: the Passover eve seder. Scholarly investigation has largely ignored the flow of Jewish time comparable to the Christian analysis of the Easter season. But a great deal has been written on the origins of the seder in late antiquity and its evolution ever since. My remarks here introduce the essays in volumes 5 and 6 that deal with the seder; I postpone to volume 6 my consideration of the essays that deal specifically with the structuring of sacred time in the Jewish tradition.
Because the topic of the seder is so constrained, and because Jewish scholarship attending to it has been so tiny, compared to Christian research on the many facets of Easter, it is relatively easy to say what we now think we know about the subject, and to offer a context within which the essays that follow may be understood. The modern study of the seder precedes recent decades, but our current views are largely the accomplishment of the last half century, so that we need not dig deeply into the rarities of library archives in order to get a firm grasp on our subject. Although consensus exists on many things, certain issues remain outstanding and are the topic of further essays in these two volumes.
These larger issues resolve themselves into a fairly modest list.
How did the seder and the Haggadah come into being? The two are intertwined but not identical, since the seder (as ritualized meal) is distinct from the Haggadah (the liturgical script that accompanies it). The seder came first.
The seder is almost certainly related to the Greco-Roman festive meal known as a symposium. The practice is known best, perhaps, as the title of a Platonic dialogue, but it has its own lengthy evolution throughout the Greco-Roman era. We owe this insight primarily to S. [Sigmund] Stein’s influential article of 1957. Stein accepted Plutarch’s definition of a symposium as a banquet followed by “a communion of serious and mirthful entertainment, discourse and actions.”1 The seder is a rabbinic symposium, its topic of discourse being the Exodus.
Following Stein, most scholars have assumed the existence of the symposium meal in rabbinic circles, not just for the seder but for festivals in general, the seder being just a special case, for which the Haggadah as liturgical script was developed. As we now have it, the seder looks less like a symposium than we might expect—the meal occurs at the end of the proceedings rather than at the beginning, for instance. But the origin of the seder in the tableship rites of late antiquity is rather firmly established. In 1970, for example, Gordon J. Bahr tried to unravel the eucharistic words of Jesus by exploring the state of the Jewish symposium at the time, seeing Jesus’ charge to his disciples against the backdrop of the Mishnah’s rules for sacred meals.2
Stein’s thesis was challenged by Baruch Bokser. In a line of reasoning that he traced back through Henry Fischel to Morton Smith, Bokser refused to see the seder as just a Jewish symposium. He asked “whether the Hellenistic elements of the Passover evening rite determined its character [or whether] the editor of the Mishnah and his sources were aware of the similarities but strove to differentiate between the Jewish rite and the other types of banquets so as to maintain the distinctive character of the Passover celebration.”3 Bokser argued that casting the seder as a symposium glosses over its uniqueness as a distinctive religious response to the loss of the Temple in 70. But Bokser’s critique did not become normative, and Bokser himself died an untimely death. He did not live to see the plethora of more recent studies on the symposium that provide clearer evidence of the effect the symposium had on the seder’s beginnings.
Part 1 of volume 5 opens, therefore, with Blake Leyerle’s summary of what we now know about Greco-Roman symposia. Besides providing the necessary background against which to determine the seder’s origins, Leyerle evaluates specifically such issues as the status of women at these banquets and the precise order of the ceremonies. The following essay by Joseph Tabory concludes that the seder was indeed a symposium originally. Tabory traces a three-fold development of the symposium, arguing that the seder emerged out of the second and third versions (after the Temple’s destruction in 70), and interpreting many of the Haggadah’s passages against the backdrop of symposium practice at the time.
Seeing the seder as a symposium has underscored the obvious but not always appreciated aspect of Judaism as a religion celebrated at table. The seder was no mere anomaly. Spirituality at meals is crucial elsewhere, especially within the institution known as a chavurah (pl. chavurot).
Investigation of the chavurah began in the 1960s and 1970s, prompted not only by the interest in the seder as symposium, but also by the counter-culture of the time, in which young Jews, especially, were leaving synagogues and founding radically democratized institutions that they called chavurot.4 Their interest was sparked by the possibility that earlier versions of the same thing might have abounded. Rabbinic chavurot differed from the counter-cultural groups of the 1960s, but the name was the same, and the common terminology helped fuel scholarship that ultimately revised our view of rabbinic society, by taking seriously the aspect of table spirituality.
Instead of seeing the Rabbis engaged primarily in synagogues, we learned to see them occupied with a dual ritual focus: study, on one hand, and mealtime rites, on the other. No one should have been surprised. Table spirituality is central to the Gospels, after all. Moreover, a whole chapter (chapter 8) of B’rakhot (the Mishnah’s tractate on prayer) is devoted to mealtime matters debated by Hillelites and Shammaites, the two rabbinic schools of thought that dominated the first century, and two more of its chapters (chapters 6 and 7) provide detail regarding table blessings before and after eating. This is an enormous allotment of space, given the fact that the Sh’ma and its Blessings and the T’fillah (the two central rubrics of the synagogue service) are given only five chapters between the two of them. The Mishnah thus accords banquet rules as much attention as it does these two statutory synagogue rubrics.5 Table prayer was obviously central to rabbinic religion, and the seder was a particular example of table prayer. The chavurah was the milieu in which table prayer proceeded, just as the synagogue (eventually) became the place where the public liturgy of the hours took place.
I say “eventually” because, as it happens, even as we have affirmed the significance of the chavurah, we have lowered our assessment of the synagogue as a first-century place for prayer. Again, an objective reading of the Mishnah tells the tale. It mentions the synagogue only sparingly (forbidding shortcuts through its precincts, for instance), and without regard to prayer. New Testament evidence pictures Jesus and Paul in synagogues frequently, but again, not praying there. Then too, there is the evidence from funerary and synagogue inscriptions. The former mention synagogues frequently, but not usually in connection with Rabbis, and the latter, which appear on synagogues themselves, rarely include Rabbis on their lists of prominent members. A first-century Greek inscription, for instance, denotes a synagogue built by Theodotus, son of Vettenus, a priest and synagogue president—but apparently not a Rabbi. His synagogue was to be a place where guests might stay the night and where Torah would be taught; absent from his list of functions is prayer. More striking still are inscriptions describing women as prominent synagogue leaders, including presidents6—hardly what one would expect of a rabbinic institution, given the Rabbis’ view of women as marginal to communal religious life. The Dura-Europos Synagogue from the Greco-Roman Diaspora is completely unpredictable from rabbinic legislation, not to mention the host of other synagogues we are unearthing which refuse to obey such rabbinic rules as the way they should face.7 Lee Levine thus concludes that the synagogue became central for the Rabbis only from the third century on.8 It may have functioned as a waystation for guests, a place for study, and a meeting house—but it did not house a prayer service originally.
On the other hand, the Mishnah returns to chavurah meals and membership rules regularly. Nowadays, with the synagogue liturgy for festivals so well established, the seder seems to be a mere prelude to the larger liturgy of public synagogue prayer, but that is not the way it once was. The Mishnah does know daily public prayer for rabbinic circles, but how developed it was, and how important it was relative to the table worship of the seder, is hard to say. Stefan Reif thinks prayer in general was a poor second to Torah study as the “liturgy” or “service” of the Rabbis,9 and within the class of prayer as opposed to study, table ritual was certainly primary. A distinguishing feature of the particular table ritual of the seder is that it combined prayer and study in ways that often make it hard to distinguish one from the other. Our two volumes on Passover and Easter have little to say about the synagogue liturgy. They concentrate instead on the seder and its attendant ritual script, the Passover Haggadah.
The broad outline of the seder’s origins is fairly well established. As Tabory explains, at least one version of the standard second-century symposium provided for learned discussion following a meal, the foods for which prompted the conversation. Originally, then, the seder meal was preceded by no liturgy other than the standard blessings with which foods are normally consumed, and the equally usual mealtime benediction for inaugurating sacred time (the Kiddush, or, more fully, K’dushat Hayom, the prayer announcing the “Sanctification of the Day”).
Following some currents in ritual studies, we may conceptualize the seder as sacred theater, seeing these introductory prayers (1) as the setting of the stage, the stage itself being the table and special foods on which the company dined. The drama opened with (2) a rhetorical question or questions about the food, designed to stimulate (3) a free-flowing account of the Exodus as response. The evening ended with (4) praise of God in the form of psalms, known collectively as a Hallel. The whole evening was thus structured to move from (1) food to (2) questions, (3) response, and (4) celebrative praise. As the Mishnah puts it, “They begin with degradation and end in praise.”
It is important to emphasize that the entire liturgy was orally delivered. We should abandon the search for an original (and therefore authentic) text; celebrants followed the structure of the night’s drama without being bound by any specific verbal performance of it. The so-called “Four Questions,” the form in which the questioning part of the script (2) has reached us, was by no means the universal norm, for instance, and the response (3), though nowadays a lengthy midrashic embellishment of Deuteronomy 26, may have been anything from a short recollection of scriptural verses to a rambling account of God’s miracles, replete with abundantly invented elaboration. Nor can we assume that the final praise section (4) was the particular set of psalms that we have now (Pss. 113–118), even though at least two of them (Pss. 113, 114) are debated with regard to the seder by first-century Hillelites and Shammaites, who may therefore have taken at least these two psalms as staples even in the beginning years. It is likely, however, that although these two psalms were common, others were said, including Psalms 115–118 (which we now say as part of the whole, calling them all the Egyptian Hallel). The Mishnah knows also a Great Hallel, which the Talmud identifies retrospectively (rightly or wrongly) as Psalm 136, but here too, some other psalm (or psalms) may have been customary in this locale or that.
Sometime in the second century, for reasons not completely known, the sacred drama that we call the liturgy (2–4) was moved so that it preceded the meal (1). Whereas once, celebrants would have posed any rhetorical question whatever, depending on the particular aspect of the meal that struck their fancy, the questions (2) now came before the meal (1) was served. With nothing to prompt them, the questions were removed from the context of the meal and framed as a single set of standardized stock queries. By then, moreover, the once free-flowing response (3) was being fixed according to a midrashic treatment of Deuteronomy 26, probably at the initiative of Gamaliel II (c. 90 C.E.), who augmented the response with a mandatory explanation of the symbolism implicit in certain seder foods. By then the Hallel (4) too was less open to variation, so that the Haggadah as we know it today was largely in place. Instead of the original order: (1) food, (2) questions, (3) answer, and (4) praise (Hallel)—all freely composed in a manner typical of ritual performance in oral societies—we find (2) questions, (3) answer, (4) Hallel, and only afterward, (1) food—all more or less fixed, not necessarily word for word, but certainly as to topic and at least some preferred biblical citations.
We know little of the details that marked the Haggadah’s growth immediately after the Mishnah’s canonization (c. 200) and throughout the several centuries during which rabbinic authorities known as Amoraim functioned in both Palestine and Babylonia. The two amoraic works, the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds, discuss the seder, but do not tell us precisely what was customary, so that we have to wait until geonic literature (c. 750–1034) for a comprehensive snapshot of the ritual. The Geonim were Jewish authorities around Bagdad, where the Abbasid caliphate had located the center of the Islamic empire. Two such Geonim, Amram and Saadiah (c. 860 and 920, respectively), penned prayer books containing a Haggadah text.10 From the same period we also have our earliest Genizah fragments, typical of Palestinian ritual rather than the geonic Babylonian preferences.11 In general, Babylonian authorities tended toward liturgical fixity more than Palestinians did, but in both cases, the Haggadah appears to have grown considerably, becoming a literary document with prescribed wording rather than the oral vehicle for liturgical performance that it had once been. Its origin as a symposium was long forgotten. In some cases, the literary remains of earlier rabbinic writings had been added, and various talmudic practices too had been incorporated—mostly, into the Response section (3), which still retained at its core a midrash to Deuteronomy 26 and Gamaliel’s interpretation of the symbols, but now included much else as well. For instance, a third-century talmudic debate on the meaning of “degradation” now served as a preface for the midrash, so that celebrants began their answer by considering whether degradation was physical (“Our forebears were slaves to Pharaoh . . .”) or spiritual (“In the beginning our forebears worshiped idols . . .”).
The most controversial such addition is the poem Dayyenu, a litany describing Israel’s sacred history, its Sacred Myth, in effect.12 Saadiah Gaon refers to it as merely optional, suggesting that it might have been composed relatively recently, possibly as late as the ninth or tenth centuries. On the other hand, a persistent tradition places it much earlier, seeing in it a reflection of the Jewish-Christian debate in early Palestine. This debate is freshly explained and interpreted by Israel Yuval in his first essay in this volume, “Easter and Passover As Early Jewish-Christian Dialogue.”
The theory that Dayyenu is the result of inter-religious rivalry is part of a much larger tradition in liturgical scholarship, by which not just the seder but much of Jewish prayer in general is conceptualized as having developed for polemical purposes, especially against Christianity. This “political” hermeneutic by which the liturgy is explained came into being with the nineteenth-century pioneers of Jewish scholarship, but they were repeating a long-standing medieval tradition. Rabbis in the Middle Ages regularly explained innovation as a response to persecution; the Talmuds too had taken that approach for such matters as the disappearance of the Ten Commandments from the liturgy—prompted, they said, as a response to certain unnamed heretics who claimed that only the Ten Commandments (and not the entire Torah) were given at Sinai. It was eventually commonplace to read that the invention of the Haftarah (the prophetic lection), the writing of Piyyutim (liturgical poetry), and redundancies in the liturgy all stemmed from political calculation. Typical of this approach in our century was Jacob Mann (1888–1940), an outstanding scholar, who wrote an article in 1925 entitled “Changes in the Divine Service Due to Religious Persecution.”13
The political school of analysis was applied to the Haggadah by a contemporary of Mann, Louis Finkelstein (1895–1991), whose pioneer articles on the Haggadah were published in the influential Harvard Theological Review.14 Finkelstein was influenced by Marxist thought, and saw the Rabbis as an early proletariat locked in class conflict with the Sadducees, a bourgeois old-guard rural aristocracy. He therefore interpreted a good deal of the Haggadah as an early political diatribe by Pharisees in the wake of the urbanization of Palestine that followed the Hellenization of Alexander the Great and his immediate successors. The midrash was said to reflect the politics of Jews caught between warring factions in Egypt (the Ptolemies) and further east (the Seleucids).
Though commonly cited still as probative, Finkelstein’s reconstruction has been thoroughly discredited, especially by E. D. Goldschmidt (1895–1972), who emerged in the 1960s as the most prominent historian and textual critic of Jewish liturgy, and whose detailed literary analysis of the Haggadah remains to this day our most competent and comprehensive account of the seder’s textual transmission.15 He exposed Finkelstein’s dating of the earliest Haggadah strata as altogether too early, and described the midrash as evolving slowly from some mishnaic origins to a final form that crystallized only after the Talmud was canonized. Finding written parallels in the Babylonian Talmud (but no earlier), he held that the midrash borrowed from the Talmud rather than the other way around.
Goldschmidt’s alternative reconstruction of the Haggadah’s midrashic response is probably equally incorrect, however, in that it is predicated upon the assumption that the Haggadah is a text like other texts, rather than the ultimate distillation of a ritual that probably existed in orally transmitted form for centuries.16 He dated all textual material only at the time of its earliest extant literary residue, ignoring the possibility of oral performance of a ritual script that only eventually was referred to in written sources. But his critique of Finkelstein should not on that account be doubted. If the midrash is not as late as Goldschmidt would like, it is certainly not as early as Finkelstein imagined; it is certainly not a pre-Maccabean document that argued the rabbinic or Pharisaic position against Sadducees, and the hopes of Ptolemaic supporters against the Seleucids. The question that remains unsolved is the extent to which it is a political document at all; should liturgy be regarded as a cultural form that is primarily driven by the need to polemicize against rival ideologies?
Many scholars have retained the political hermeneutic. Since the name of Gamaliel II (c. 90 C.E.) is frequently associated with the text, and since Gamaliel is associated with attempts to defend Judaism against the early church, recent claims regarding the political significance of the Haggadah have focused especially on the Jewish-Christian debate of late antiquity.
The same Gamaliel II who demands the interpretation of the seder’s symbols and who may have authored an early version of the midrashic response is linked to the formulation of the so-called Birkat Minim, literally, “The Blessing of Heretics”—actually, a malediction against heretics in general and Jewish-Christians in particular. Apparently, alternative and probably earlier versions of that blessing circulated having nothing to do with Christians per se, but the appearance in some texts of the Hebrew Notsrim (or Natsrim), “Nazarenes,” makes it virtually certain that at least some form of Christianity was included in the list of heresies against which the blessing was directed. The question is, How much else in Jewish liturgy should be similarly explained? The most prominent representatives of those wishing to apply the anti-Christianity theory of Haggadah formulation are Robert Eisler, Solomon Zeitlin, David Daube, Samson Levey, and Eric Werner. Eisler’s career as a claimant of Jewish-Christian polemic (in many ways the most colorful) is discussed at some length by Israel Yuval (pp. 115–116 below). I can therefore limit my remarks to the others on my list.
Solomon Zeitlin (1886–1976) built his reputation on a strict application of historical method to rabbinic text, fighting a lifetime battle against what he considered a fruitless theological approach to the study of antiquity. He was especially intent on unraveling derogatory theories of Judaism spawned by Christian scholars who did not read Jewish sources and who accepted uncritically claims about Judaism made in the Gospels or patristic literature. He wrote repeatedly, for instance, against the historicity of the gospel account linking Jews to the passion and crucifixion of Jesus,17 and in 1928 he analyzed the so-called Christ passage in Josephus (a section attesting to the wonder-work of Jesus in Galilee and identifying him as the Christ), eventually demonstrating that it was a forgery, which he attributed to Eusebius.18 Zeitlin gave us one of the earliest scientific studies of the Haggadah, but did not go into matters very deeply. He preferred instead to polemicize against the church’s failure to counteract the blood libel in the Middle Ages, and to find anti-Christian background even for Rabban Gamaliel’s use of euphemisms for the name of God, rather than Adonai, which would have been rendered Kyrios (he thought) and been confused with Jesus.19
Zeitlin’s approach was furthered by the British scholar, David Daube (also discussed by Yuval). In a thin and relatively obscure, but nonetheless widely quoted, monograph of a lecture given in 1966, Daube identified the Passover seder as a messianic meal.20 He saw particularly the act of secreting and then consuming a final piece of matsah (called the afikoman) as anticipatory of the messiah’s coming. Samson Levey went so far as to explain a rabbinic debate on the seder (now carried in the Haggadah) as an internal polemic against a renegade Rabbi who had gone over to Jewish-Christianity.21 And Eric Werner was the first to link the Haggadah’s Dayyenu (then universally believed to be an early literary stratum) to a similar sacred history with anti-Jewish bias, penned by Melito, Bishop of Sardis.22
Israel Yuval’s reconsideration of the polemical tradition goes well beyond his predecessors, in that he has reconceptualized the early relationship of Jews and Christians and trained his historian’s eye on sources by Jews and by Christians equally. His conceptual breakthrough accords with a reasonably recent view of rabbinic Judaism and Christianity as two variant forms of early Judaism, rather than of Christianity as a later offshoot of the earlier rabbinic system. Viewing the two forces as locked in the symbiotic process of mutual self-definition allows him to posit an equal influence of each side upon the other, rather than interpreting Judaism as the mother faith and Christianity as the reactive and rebellious offshoot. His first essay in this volume surveys prior claims of anti-Christian polemic and builds a case for systematic and decisive anti-Christian bias throughout the early Haggadah text. His second essay turns to the medieval world, observing the continual interplay, in France and Germany especially, of the two sister faiths that remained in liturgical dialogue.
Yuval’s second essay, “Passover in the Middle Ages,” reminds us of the extent to which the Ashkenazi world of France and Germany added its own layer to the Haggadah text. Prior to that time, there is little indication of any after-dinner liturgy, other than a continuation of the psalms that constituted the final “Praise” section of the service. Originally, the meal had entirely concluded before the after-dinner symposium conversation. Moving the meal, in the second century, had the consequence that the meal now ended the night’s celebration rather than beginning it. The Mishnah records a debate on the Hallel, implying that psalms were said both immediately before and after eating, and the geonic material clearly does allocate things that way. But today’s seder is outfitted with a variety of additional after-dinner words and actions, largely messianic, that came into being only after the First Crusade, and reflected the antipathy of German Jews to the Christian decimation of Rhineland Jewry at the end of the eleventh century. In addition, we may see a Jewish version of the general religious fervor that swept Europe in the twelfth century and beyond, and anticipated imminent messianic deliverance.
In general, the additional material consists of a collection of biblical verses calling for divine revenge on Israel’s enemies (“Pour out your wrath on the nations who know You not . . .”). It was recited with the door flung open to admit Elijah the prophet, a forerunner of the messiah, who, it was hoped, would announce the latter’s imminent arrival. A concluding line, now the hallmark of the seder’s end, announced, “Next year in Jerusalem,” in conjunction with a verse from an eleventh-century poem that affirmed the successful conclusion of the rite, as if to say that messianic deliverance was conditional on punctilious ritual perfection. About the same time, various mnemonics were developed to guarantee the proper ritual performance that would bring the messiah in its train.
The entire set of additions is clearly messianic. As my own essay on bread as a symbol of salvation indicates (volume 6), rabbinic lore had assumed all along that Passover eve was the time scheduled for ultimate redemption. “On that night they were redeemed [in the past] and on that night they will be redeemed in the future,” Rabbi Joshua had held.23 A Hillelite/-Shammaite debate on when to say Psalm 119:1, “When Israel went out of Egypt,” betrays the Rabbis’ common concern for pacing the seder ritual so as to replicate the state of affairs as they had unfolded in Egypt, and timing the announcement from the psalm at precisely the hour when Israel did in fact leave Egypt24—an example of rabbinic belief in the imminence of redemption, but only at a stipulated time: an auspicious hour, which had to be the same cosmic moment when redemption in the past had come about. Messianic fervor following the millennium now revived old hopes, fueled by millennial aspirations in Europe generally, and by the shock of losing so many in the massacre by the Crusaders.
Beyond this bare outline, most of which is still somewhat speculative, we know little about medieval alterations in the Haggadah. As thoroughly as scholars have mined the relatively sparse texts from late antiquity (Mishnah, Tosefta, and the two Talmuds), the relatively large cache of medieval sources has been virtually ignored.25 Yet the decentralized Jewish communities in present-day France and Germany spawned one authority after another who recorded how the seder should be conducted and what the Haggadah meant in the context of the times. We have similar records from Italy and Spain. Provençal Jewry was especially prolific in its textual tradition. Israel Yuval’s second essay, which explores these medieval sources, is therefore especially interesting. He continues the theme laid down in his earlier chapter: the close connection between Jewish and Christian ritual and their mutual borrowing, as each side sparred for clarity of identity vis-à-vis the other.
Fortunately, the textual legacy of the Middle Ages can be augmented by an artistic one. If anything demonstrates the close interdependence of the Jewish and Christian communities, it is their common fascination with prayer-book illustrations in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. We may know little from our texts about the complex of messianic ideas symbolized best by the coming of Elijah, but we can deduce a great deal about it from artistic depictions that leave little doubt about what Jews hoped. No study of the seder would be complete without some survey of the magnificent tradition of Haggadah art, some merely decorative, but some a fine index of the situation in which Jews found themselves and of their aspirations. Witness the appearance of Pharaoh’s horsemen as Crusaders, for instance, or, the pictures of Elijah and the messiah, sometimes merged into a single figure, riding on a white donkey and picking up Jewish celebrants to carry them off on Passover eve to Jerusalem.
From this tradition, we get the well-known Cup of Elijah as a ubiquitous seder symbol. Its origins lie in a second-century custom attributed to Rabbi Tarfon, by which not four but five cups of wine were drunk at the seder. The Palestinian Talmud links each of the first four to a different act of divine deliverance in Israel’s sacred history, leading to the possibility that the fifth was intended to symbolize the final and as yet unrealized act of salvation, when God would once and for all redeem Israel from servitude to Rome. By the high Middle Ages, that cup reemerges, this time as a Cup of Elijah, remaining on the table undrunk but ready for drinking should Elijah and the messiah arrive.
All of this and more can be gleaned not from our texts but from our Haggadah imagery. Joseph Gutmann, one of the few art historians who pioneered the study of Haggadah illustrations, and who has written many of the premier studies identifying their themes, summarizes the state of our knowledge on the subject (“Haggadah Art,” volume 6). Yuval’s essay “Passover in the Middle Ages” must be read in conjunction with Gutmann’s contribution for a balanced appreciation of the extent to which Jews saw seder eve as a “night of watching” in which Elijah and final deliverance might quickly arrive.
The Haggadah has enjoyed a spectacular history of printing. Our earliest extant complete text with illustrations is a 1512 Christian edition by the Franciscan, Thomas Murner, who sided with Johann Reuchlin, when Reuchlin convinced Emperor Maximilian to revoke an order for the destruction of Hebrew books. Murner was also campaigning against the rival Dominicans, one of whom, Johann Pfefferkorn, a baptized Moravian Jew, had attacked the Haggadah as exemplifying the need to destroy Jewish literature in the first place. Murner hoped to demonstrate that the Haggadah contained nothing worth destroying.
Thereafter, Jews themselves established printing presses and produced illustrated Haggadahs in Prague (1526), Mantua (1560), Venice (1609), and Amsterdam (1695).26 The earlier tradition of medieval illustrations was continued by woodcuts and then copper plate, following the development of European art techniques. Haggadah manuscript illustrations had not always been the work of Jews, and the same holds true for the art of the printed Haggadah. In both cases, artists worked from models available in the reservoir of common figures and themes that artistic workshops, guilds, and trainers knew by practice. By the time of the printing press, for instance, artists had the Renaissance on which to draw. Michelangelo’s Jeremiah appears as Moses in one Haggadah text, and typical northern Italian cherubim bedeck the margins of many others.
The text as well as the artwork was altered here and there, but generally in the form of songs that had become customary and were now included in the printed offerings. After-dinner singing had probably long been the norm, and the songs did not necessarily have anything to do with Passover. Once the songs were printed, however, people often discovered ex post facto theological allusions in them, and the interpreters were not always Jews. The most popular song may well be Chad Gadya, a simple song like “The House that Jack Built,” describing a jungle-like existence in which one creature kills another until the angel of death vanquishes all—except for God. But all ritual is likely to evoke theological afterthought, and eventually, even Chad Gadya came to be seen as pregnant with hidden meaning.27
Despite these additions, however, printing ultimately served not to encourage the further addition of material, but to freeze the Haggadah’s development and to prevent its further evolution. By the nineteenth century, traditionalists were protecting the inherited printed version of their sacred liturgical scripts from Reformers who were challenging it, especially in Germany. Many authorities opposed any changes whatever, lest simple alterations open a floodgate of reforming zeal. Even as late as the Holocaust, one finds this attitude in a modern Haggadah from Vichy France that barely even alludes to the catastrophe surrounding its authors, except for noting that the harsh conditions of the war have made it necessary to relax the rules of Passover food preparation—but only for the year and with the understanding that this is no precedent.
Nonetheless, people other than the most ardent traditionalists continued to make up new Haggadahs, adding their own perspective to the printed texts that they had inherited. The versions adopted by the various liberal movements during the last century have been of greatest consequence, if only because they were mass-produced and marketed to many households. But libraries are rich in Haggadah texts that never enjoyed such wide-ranging use, yet testify to Jewish history and the penchant of Jews to see themselves in this most popular of rituals. Some are curiosities, even parodies. Some are part of an Israeli Haggadah tradition common even in kibbutzim, where socialist Jews denied every single holy-day tradition but felt the need for some kind of seder (albeit with a Haggadah that omitted the name of God).28 Others comprise a growing body of feminist Haggadahs for our time. These have often come with new artistic accompaniment, so it is not just the text that has been altered.
Modern authors have explored modern history with equally modern Haggadahs. These are surveyed by Carole Balin, whose essay in this volume makes use both of archive evidence and of Haggadahs readily available on the market stands.
1. S. Stein, “The Influence of Symposia Literature on the Literary Form of the Pesach Haggadah,” JJS 69 (1957): 18; reprinted in Henry A. Fischel, Essays in Greco-Roman and Related Talmudic Literature (New York, 1977), p. 203.
2. Gordon J. Bahr, “The Seder of Passover and the Eucharistic Words,” Novum Testamentum 12 (1970): 181–202; reprinted in Fischel, Essays, pp. 473–94.
3. Baruch M. Bokser, The Origins of the Seder (Berkeley, 1984), p. 50.
4. On which, see esp. Riv-Ellen Prell, Prayer and Community: The Havurah in American Judaism (Detroit, 1989).
5. The Sh’ma occupies chapters 1 and 2, and the T’fillah takes up chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 3 details rules of exemption from statutory prayer, and includes Sh’ma, T’fillah, and the Grace after Meals (Birkat Hamazon) more or less equally.
6. Bernadette J. Brooten, Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue (Chico, Calif., 1982).
7. For summary, see Marilyn J. S. Chiat and Marchita B. Mauck, “Using Archeological Sources,” in volume 1 of this series (Paul F. Bradshaw and Lawrence A. Hoffman, eds., The Making of Jewish and Christian Worship [Notre Dame, 1991], pp. 69–92).
8. Lee I. Levine, “The Sages and the Synagogue in Late Antiquity,” in Lee I. Levine, ed., The Galilee in Late Antiquity (New York, 1992), pp. 206–7.
9. Stefan C. Reif, Judaism and Hebrew Prayer (Cambridge, 1993), p. 67.
10. See Lawrence A. Hoffman, The Canonization of the Synagogue Service (Notre Dame, 1979), pp. 10–23.
11. Genizah fragments of the Palestinian Haggadah were first published by Israel Abrahams, “Some Egyptian Fragments of the Passover Haggada,” JQR, o.s., 10 (1898): 41–51; cf. E. D. Goldschmidt, Haggadah Shel Pesach V’toldoteha (Jerusalem, 1960), pp. 75–84.
12. Lawrence A. Hoffman, Beyond the Text (Bloomington, 1987), pp. 105–7.
13. HUCA 4 (1927): 241–311.
14. Louis Finkelstein, “The Oldest Midrash: Pre-rabbinic Ideals and Teachings in the Passover Haggadah,” HTR 31 (1938): 291–332; “Pre-Maccabean Documents in the Passover Haggadah,” HTR 36 (1943): 1–38.
15. Goldschmidt, Haggadah Shel Pesach V’toldoteha.
16. See Hoffman, Beyond the Text, pp. 90–91.
17. Solomon Zeitlin, “The Crucifixion of Jesus Reexamined,” JQR 32 (1941): 344–46; Who Crucified Jesus (New York, 1942); “The Crucifixion: A Libelous Accusation Against the Jews,” JQR 55 (1964): 1–22.
18. Solomon Zeitlin, “The Christ Passage in Josephus,” JQR 18 (1928): 231–55.
19. Solomon Zeitlin, “The Liturgy of the First Night of Passover,” JQR 38 (1948): 443–49.
20. David Daube, He That Cometh (London, 1966).
21. Samson H. Levey, “Ben Zoma, the Sages, and Passover,” Journal of Reform Judaism 28 (1981): 33–40.
22. Eric Werner, “Melito of Sardis, the First Poet of Deicide,” HUCA 37 (1966): 191–210.
23. Mekhilta Bo, ed. Horowitz, p. 52.
24. M. Pes. 10:9.
25. An important exception is Israel Ta-Shma, many of whose articles on medieval customs are now collected in Minhag Ashkenaz Hakadmon (Jerusalem, 1992).
26. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Haggadah and History (Philadelphia, 1975).
27. Cecil Roth, “An Only Kid,” Commentary (April 1967): 82–85.
28. On which, cf., e.g., Shalom Lilker, Kibbutz Judaism (New York, 1982), pp. 169–82; and (in English) Yehuda Sharett, “Foreward to the Haggada,” Shdemot [English edition] 20 (1983): 49–56.