This volume, known as the Cervera Bible, survived multiple journeys around Spain and then Europe, against all odds. Inscriptions place it with a family from Cordoba in 1379; a century later, it was in La Coruña, Galicia, where its fanciful imagery inspired another Sephardic masterpiece, the Kennicott Bible. Then the trail goes cold—until 1804, just as Jews were being invited back to Portugal, when the secretary of the Portuguese embassy in The Hague learned that “the oldest and most rare Hebrew manuscript” was for sale. An urgent missive went out to António Ribeiro dos Santos, head librarian of Portugal’s newly created Royal Public Library. He authorized the purchase immediately—for a sum said to be 500 times his own annual salary. So, the volume that had been secreted out of Iberia three centuries earlier returned in glory as a valued national treasure.

Since then, Portugal’s National Library, as it’s now called, has exhibited the Cervera Bible only rarely. But starting this week, its distinctive artistry will be showcased as never before. In a rare loan, conservators have let it travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art—and, in a rarer move, permitted the Met’s curators to turn the pages once a week, for a total of eight times, displaying multiple facets of Hazarfati’s delightful Gothic illuminations. The Portuguese library, meanwhile, has posted a high-resolution, downloadable, online version of the entire manuscript. Now, the library’s deputy director, Maria Inês Cordeiro, told me, viewers can hunt for and zoom in on the 20 places ibn Gaon embedded his own name in the micrography, as in this fire-breathing creature’s feet.

At the Met, the Bible is starring in a special installation on the first floor. It’s surrounded by contemporaneous objects from the Met’s collection, mostly from England and France, bearing similar iconography—medallions, Christian sacred texts, a spectacular Limoges book cover plaque. The show is part of the “Medieval Jewish Art in Context” series, supported by a grant from the David Berg Foundation, which funds loans of important Judaica for display with objects from the museum’s holdings. But the curators, Melanie Holcomb and Barbara Drake Boehn, have cleverly used a different loan program to make another interesting match: A few feet away is the Micrographic Bible, made in Germany circa 1300, which they borrowed from the Jewish Theological Seminary last spring. It got its name, of course, from the exquisite miniature script that creates shapes and designs, a practice common in both Jewish and Islamic art for centuries.

For the first time, that commonality is also illustrated in permanent-collection galleries at the Met—in the new space for Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia (unofficially known as the Islamic galleries). Here, too, because the Met doesn’t own any major Judaica from these cultures, it has relied on loans: The entire section representing Jewish culture in Al Andalus, including tiles from Toledo’s El Tránsito synagogue, is comprised of objects borrowed from the Hispanic Society of America in upper Manhattan. One highlight is the stunning Hispano-Moresque Bible, finished in Seville in 1472. Unlike its counterparts in the medieval galleries, this volume features no images of people or animals: The patterns formed by its micrography are strictly floral and geometric, conforming with Islamic precepts. It closely resembles the Quranic pages strategically installed in the same vitrine.

If you’re counting, that makes three medieval Hebrew Bibles on view at one time at the Met—an apparently unprecedented circumstance, and one that curators say was not coordinated by the two departments. (A fourth Bible, a late-15th-century Spanish volume also on loan from the Hispanic Society, is standing by, waiting to be installed in the Met’s Arab-lands galleries when other objects are switched out.)

For repeat visitors of the Cervera installation, one highlight will be pages from the Sefer Mikhlol, the grammatical treatise that accompanies the sacred text, where Joseph Hazarfati did his most fantastical work. As the display changes, coming weeks will bring centaurs, unicorns, mermen, and several courtly hunting scenes—a dog chases a hare; a falconer and a crossbow-aiming figure converge on a bird perched on a crenelated tower. Do such motifs hold larger symbolism for Sephardic Jews? “Sometimes a crossbow is just a crossbow,” Boehm said. Vassar scholar Marc Michael Epstein wasn’t so sure—in other Jewish medieval iconography, he noted, such images can be read as metaphors for persecution, betrayal, or exile. “To assume that nothing is ever going on may be naive,” he said. “To assume that profundities are always going on is over-reading. The truth may lie somewhere in between.”

That’s probably also the case with the forces that brought these Bibles together at the Met. At the very least, their simultaneous presence seems to reflect a multi-departmental initiative to incorporate Judaica into the narrative that the permanent-collection galleries tell. The divergence in sources and sponsors for the loans in the two departments may also be relevant, or not. Same with outreach. The Washington Haggadah, first in the “Medieval Jewish Art in Context” series, was on view last Passover. The next loan in the series, of the Rylands Haggadah, is slated for Passover next year. The Cervera Bible, as it happens, includes one of the most famous images of a menorah in art history: the Menorah of Zechariah’s Vision, that mesmerizing candelabra, emanating from an intense azure ground, familiar from countless Jewish book covers and tallit bags. That’s the page that goes on view December 20—the day Hannukah begins.

This week, Jews everywhere will engage in the annual ritual of digging out their haggadahs from the bookshelves and closets where they have been stored since last Passover. The typical haggadah is only used a couple of nights a year, far less than a prayer book or a Bible. But somehow, the words and images of the haggadah—whether it’s an Artscroll tome or a flimsy Maxwell House booklet—have a way of sinking deep into the memory. At many Seder tables, the haggadah itself becomes a record of meals past, with wine drops discoloring the page that lists the Ten Plagues and food stains marking the sections for matzoh and maror.

Perhaps the power of the haggadah has to do with the way Passover is celebrated at home, rather than in synagogue; perhaps it comes from the way children are enlisted in the Seder early on, with important roles like reciting the Four Questions and finding the afikoman. And surely it is related to the fact that the Passover liturgy constantly insists on the importance of remembering and reenacting the past. This memorial purpose is emphasized at the very moment the holiday is instituted, in chapter 12 of Exodus: “And it shall come to pass, when ye be come to the land which the Lord will give you, according as he hath promised, that ye shall keep this service. And it shall come to pass, when your children shall say unto you, What mean ye by this service? That ye shall say, It is the sacrifice of the Lord’s passover, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt, when he smote the Egyptians, and delivered our houses.”

There is a striking dislocation of time here: Even before the Lord has smitten the Egyptians, even before the Israelites have been freed, Moses is already looking forward to an era when these events will have to be recollected. The haggadah itself can be seen as a tool for collapsing time. To explain the holiday to the son “who does not know how to ask,” it instructs, “you shall explain to your son on that day, ‘It is because of what God did for me when I went free from Egypt’ ”—as though each Jew still had the foam of the Red Sea on his shoes.

No run-of-the-mill haggadah is quite as effective at making the past present, however, as The Washington Haggadah (Harvard University Press, $39.95). This beautifully produced book is a detailed facsimile of a 500-year-old haggadah in the collection of the Library of Congress, which explains the name (although it is currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Thanks to an inscription near the end of the book, we even know the exact day it was finished—January 29, 1478—and the name of the scribe who produced it: “The work was completed, and it is sufficient. And today is the twenty-fifth day of the month of Shevat in the year 238 according to the short enumeration. The work of the least of the scribes, Joel, the son of Simeon of blessed memory.”

But Joel ben Simeon was being too modest. Far from being “the least of the scribes,” he is described by David Stern, in the introduction to this edition, as “one of the most important and prolific scribes and illustrators in the history of the Jewish book.” Ten manuscripts bearing Joel’s signature survive, and another four to nine can be attributed to him based on peculiarities of his style, which combines the traditions of his native Germany with those of northern Italy, where he spent much of his working life.

The first thing that strikes the contemporary reader of this 15th-century book is that, if you threw away your haggadahs and replaced them with copies of The Washington Haggadah, you would hardly notice the difference—except, of course, for the aesthetic improvement. The Hebrew and Aramaic text is the same one we use today. There are the same mishnaic passages (“Said Rabbi Eliezer ben Azaryah: Look! I am seventy years old, and I never merited understanding why the Exodus should be mentioned in the evening until Ben Zoma interpreted the following verse.”), and even, on the first page, the same mnemonic for the order of the Seder (“Kadesh Urchatz Karpas Yachatz”).

This concrete evidence of the way the Seder has been performed for centuries is a powerful lesson in what is dryly called “Jewish continuity.” More powerful still, however, are the illustrations that Joel ben Simeon added to the margins of the text (usefully, The Washington Haggadah includes a descriptive catalog of all these illustrations). On the first page of the manuscript, for instance, underneath the blessing for getting rid of chametz, there is a picture of a man peering into a cupboard, holding a candle for better light and a feather for sweeping stray crumbs. Behind him, another man, wearing red tights, a blue singlet, and a green cap, uses a bellows to fan a fire where the collected chametz is being burned. This kind of charming, lifelike, instantly legible drawing will be familiar to anyone who has looked at medieval Latin manuscripts; but here they are translated to a Jewish context, offering glimpses of how our ancestors lived before Columbus discovered America.

Sometimes, the pictures communicate more than you’d expect. The four sons, explains Katrin Kogman-Appel in her essay on “The Illustrations of the Washington Haggadah,” were a popular theme for medieval illustrators, giving the chance to depict different human and social types. In The Washington Haggadah, the wise son is shown as a scholar, seated on a chair with a book open on his lap and a thoughtful expression. He is effectively contrasted with the simple son, who sits on the floor and peers suspiciously at an open book he’s clearly having a hard time with. The son who doesn’t know how to ask is a jester, wearing a cap and bells and beating a drum. But the most interesting drawing is the wicked son: He is depicted as a Christian knight, wearing armor and holding a sword and lance. This image, so familiar even today as the embodiment of chivalric virtue, appears to the Jews as a symbol of vice—the proud, violent face of the oppressor. It’s a small gesture that succeeds in overturning our received ideas about the Christian and Jewish past.

A more domestic kind of realism can be seen in other drawings. Underneath the “Dayenu,” just at the point in the Seder when mealtime is approaching, Joel has drawn a scene of two women stirring a pot over a blazing fire, while a man next to them turns a spit. The man, we note, has a prominent goiter—a symptom of iodine deficiency that would have been a common sight in certain regions of Germany in the Middle Ages. More pointedly, Joel illustrates the text about maror with a picture of a man and woman, evidently a married couple; the woman is holding a sword, an emblem of discord, while the man tries to stuff a bitter herb into her mouth. It’s a wry commentary on family life, somehow made more affecting by the way it sits across the page from a whimsical drawing of a monkey brandishing a piece of matzoh.

Food leaves its trace in The Washington Haggadah in a more concrete way, as well. The publishers have reproduced the manuscript so accurately that you can see wine and food spots on several pages, as well as places where the ink has smeared after being touched with a wet hand. And on one of the blank pages at the end of the manuscript, there is a handwritten note. Hard to make out, it is explained by David Stern: It was written “by one Ettore Finzi in German, dated April 7, 1879, which was indeed Passover eve that year … he writes that they are sitting at the seder table, where they have just sung the first part of the ‘Gada,’ and are awaiting the food. After the food arrives, they start eating, and he signs off, ‘Guten Appetit.’ ” From the Exodus to the Rabbis to 1478 to 1879 to 2011—in these pages, if anywhere, the past is present and the present past.



• Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, a favorite of centrists on the Israeli side, vows that Palestinians will not be provoked to violence by “the terrorism of the settlers, and the terrorism of the settlement project.” [Haaretz]

• In Finland, authorities are trying to bar anyone but doctors from performing circumcisions by prosecuting a Jewish couple whose baby experienced complications after a mohel performed his bris. [Jewish Chronicle]

• A library at Oxford University has a fascinating, and revealing, exhibit of late-medieval manuscripts, with a special focus on Jewish ones. [Times of London]

• Jewish Week columnist Abe Novick bemoans the dissipation of trust and true connectedness in our supposedly globalized world. [Jewish Week]

• Apparently there’s a big Illinois plant that makes gefilte fish. And there’s a trade dispute preventing the gefilte fish from being shipped to Israel. So, yeah, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally pledged to resolve the problem in time for Passover. Me? I prefer my gefilte fish caught in the wild. [JPost]

Things were not always thus. For centuries, Jewish prayer was an oral tradition, said from memory. Even as authoritative liturgies were codified, most didn’t have access to texts. Rather, manuscripts—by definition handwritten and unique—were created for communal use, with myriad variations according to local rites. Some of the wealthiest may have had smaller, private copies, but, for the most part, congregations either chanted prayers from memory or repeated after a cantor. Not until Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the early 1450s did books become accessible to a broader public, and for some time they remained a luxury.

But even within the unique realm of early prayer books, the Nuremberg Mahzor, which has just gone on public view for the first time in 52 years at the Israel Museum after a nearly year-long restoration, is exceptional. Completed in 1331 for the Jewish community of Nuremberg, the sumptuously decorated work is not only one of the most comprehensive illuminated Hebrew prayer books ever created, it is also among the largest medieval codices in the world.

Weighing more than 57 pounds, it is made up of 521 double-sided leaves. It includes holiday prayers for the entire Jewish calendar; the five books of the Bible known as the megillot, or scrolls; special prayers for lifecycle events like weddings and circumcisions; extensive commentaries; and—its main feature, accounting for roughly 90 percent of the text—over 700 piyutim, or liturgical poems. Moreover, the quality of the scribal work and elegantly embellished panels qualify the text as one of the region’s outstanding manuscripts. While communal mahzorim were also created in Spain, Italy, and other Jewish centers at that time, this monumental format was a phenomenon particular to the Franco-German Ashkenazi region.

Equally impressive is the work’s provenance. The colophon at the back indicates that it was commissioned by a Joshua the son of Isaac and completed on the fourth of Elul in the Hebrew year 5091. It remained in Nuremberg after the Jews were expelled from the city in 1499 and was preserved intact at the municipal library until the early 19th century, at which point, it is assumed, the Napoleonic army excised 11 of its original 528 leaves. More than a century later, the renowned publisher and Hebraica collector Salman Schocken embarked on a quest to reassemble the Nuremberg Mahzor and bring it to Israel. He recovered four of the missing leaves in the 1930s after fleeing Nazi Germany and acquired the rest in 1951 as restitution for assets that had been confiscated from him during the Holocaust. Descendants put it up for auction at Sotheby’s Tel Aviv in 2002, where it carried a $2-3 million estimate but failed to sell. At some point afterward, it was acquired privately by the Zurich-based collectors David and Jemima Jeselsohn, who have given it to the Israel Museum on extended loan. Through February 2010, it will be the centerpiece in the Shrine of the Book, home of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The restoration, conducted by Michael Maggen, head of the museum’s paper conservation laboratory, focused on rebinding the manuscript and incorporating the four recovered leaves. Overall, the mahzor was in excellent condition. “The decoration and writing looked like they were practically done yesterday,” according to assistant Judaica curator Anna Nizza, who adds that the colors and gold leaf “were amazingly preserved.” The highly skilled scribes who worked on the main text and commentary—identified as Mattanyah and Yaakov, respectively—made almost no errors despite the work’s considerable size. They also masterfully executed simple but sophisticated flourishes while leaving precise blanks around key words for, it is assumed, a Christian artist to subsequently decorate. (Jews were closed out of guilds at that time.)

Rather than iconographic subjects, human figures or narrative scenes that populate other significant 13th- and 14th-century mahzorim, the Nuremberg features 22 illuminated panels highlighting introductory words. These frames are adorned with gold and silver leaf and precious pigments, notably in rich hues of blue and red, and decorated with geometric patterns, as well as foliate motifs and exotic animals, typical of Gothic imagery. The scribes also alternated the size, type and color of the script—between black and red throughout. There is only a single text illustration, of a shofar, next to a line in a Rosh Hashana piyut about the sounding of the ram’s horn. “Unlike their contemporaries,” Nizza explains, “they chose ornamental and non-illustrative depictions, giving the manuscript an aesthetically pleasing and elegant look emphasizing its content while helping the chazan find appropriate prayers during the service.”