A Haggadah is the script for the seder ritual on the first nights of Passover. The word means “telling,” and the seder is a ritual for the telling of the Passover story—the Exodus from Egypt—in a particular rabbinic fashion. 

This modest-sized Haggadah is beautiful testimony to the lives of Jews in Iraq in the 19th century. It is written in a common journal-book, one that would have been available for purchase in a local store, with simple but beautiful decoration and fine Hebrew writing. It was written by a private individual for their own use at their seder table. 

The page in front of you, the most decorated in the whole volume, serves as a kind of title page. The decorative motifs are clearly modelled after similar decorations in Muslim settings, showing the “at-home-ness” of Iraqi Jews at this time.