Passover

Passover is the spring holiday that commemorates and celebrates the Exodus of ancient Israel from Egypt. Though originally a Temple-centered holiday, with its centerpiece being the roasted Paschal Lamb, after the Temple’s destruction Passover became a home, table-centered holiday. At the family table, participants, following the rabbinic script (the Haggadah) would recount the story of the Exodus in particularly rabbinic formulations, which included quotations of Midrash and Mishnah. As a home, family based ritual, the seder, with its Haggadah, became perhaps the most commonly celebrated of all Jewish rituals, as it has remained until this day.

Seder

The Seder is the home ritual Jews enact around their tables on the first night(s) of Passover. Originating in the Mishnah (rabbinic text, ca. 200 CE), where the ritual is designed to provoke questions by doing things out of their normal order, the Seder was codified in early post-Talmudic times into the well-ordered ceremony we know today; significantly, the ceremony was not called the Seder = “order” until this later stage, since originally such codified order was contrary to its spirit.  

As a home ceremony celebrating the founding story of the Jewish people—the Exodus from Egypt—the Seder is, and has long been, the most universally observed of all Jewish rituals. The great abundance of haggadot (the Seder’s “script”) from all ages and places attests to this popularity.

Today, many printed haggadot contain images and drawings of people around the Seder table; such a custom of illustration is not a modern innovation.  Some manuscripts contained illustrations of participants, presenting a snapshot of how the artist envisioned the seder table.

Haggadah

The Haggadah (meaning “telling”) is the script for conducting the Seder ritual on the first evening(s) of Passover. Originating in the ritual described in Mishnah Pesachim (“Passovers”), the text took on an increasingly fixed form through the sages. Due to the popularity of the seder ritual and the relative brevity of the Haggadah, the Haggadah is the most frequently copied and produced Jewish book of all time.  

Because of its popularity, and due to the lack of halakhic restrictions, the Haggadah is also the most frequently decorated or illustrated Jewish book. One will typically find, in illustrated Haggadot, images of the Matzah and Maror, the Four Sons, the enslavement of the Jews in Egypt, and others. The JTS library’s collection of manuscript Haggadot and rare prints preserves many outstanding examples of this artistic tradition. 

Four Questions

Perhaps the best-known part of the Passover Seder and Haggadah, often the first part of the Seder that children learn to recite, is the Four Questions  (“Why is this night different from all other nights?”) The Four Questions originate in the Mishnah, where there are only three, in a different form. But even in the well-known later version, the Four Questions are unmistakably a rabbinic text, and their recitation by young Jews is a sign of the success of the rabbis as creators of an unparalleled educational experience—the Seder.

Maror

Maror is the “bitter” leaf that Jews eat on Passover at the Seder. The consumption of maror on Passover is prescribed by the Torah itself, in the command that the Paschal Lamb be eaten “on Matzahs and bitter herbs.” Originally, and through the ages, the maror was always a leaf or “herb,” and it is consistently depicted as such in Haggadah illustrations. Only in later times, when, in certain lands, greens were impossible to obtain in early spring did Jews substitute things like horseradish for bitter greens.

Matzah

Matzah is unleavened bread, which was relatively common in ancient times, when one might not have had starter dough on hand. Only later did unleavened bread become rare, and particularly identified with Passover. Pre-modern Matzah was not stiff and breakable, as ours is, but much more similar to leavened bread. In addition,  Matzah was never square until it was made by modern equipment, in factories. Earlier Matzahs were round, which explains their depiction in manuscript illustrations.