Adam Cohen, “Social and Sacred in the Medieval Haggadah”

Many have read Geraldine Brooks’ bestselling novel People of the Book, which centers on the famous Sarajevo Haggadah (a book that contains the text recited at the Jewish Passover). This 2008 work of historical fiction wove a compelling story about the medieval and modern history of the 14th-century manuscript, but the full-page illuminations that make the haggadah so special played virtually no role in Brooks’ novel. Cohen will use this remarkable manuscript and its rich picture cycle as a springboard for exploring the ways that illustrated haggadot expressed two different, but intertwined issues: the social world of medieval Jews and their relationship to “the sacred.” Pictures were carefully crafted vehicles that served many functions, from crystallizing contemporary practice and shaping experience to articulating multilayered ideas about the relationship of Jews to God, to one another, and to their non-Jewish neighbors. For at least some Jews in the Middle Ages, to be the “people of the book” meant not only reading texts but also decorating them in ways that revealed urgent cogitations about identity, place, and time.

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