The more varied the talk about leaving Egypt the better” says the Haggadah. Perhaps it’s the Seder nights that honed the skills of our best storytellers, our Sholem Aleichems and Howard Jacobsons.
Here’s a Seder story told 700 years ago by one anonymous but clearly knowledgeable Spanish Jew. Happily able to afford the services of an expert scribe and an accomplished artist, he decided “a picture paints a thousand words” and asked his team to help depict his world on a single leaf of his own new Haggadah.
They chose Rabban Gamaliel’s three Seder symbols (Mishnah Pesachim 10:5) for what we know as the matzah page in the British Library’s spectacular Barcelona Haggadah, one of the most precious mediaeval Hebrew illuminated manuscripts still in existence.
What do we see here? On either side of the man brandishing two matzot, Gamaliel’s words “Matzah Zu” at the top identify, in gleaming burnished gold, the composition’s matzah centrepiece, embellished as discussed in the Talmud (BT Pesachim 37a), an attractive Pesach custom we seem sadly to have neglected.
Four Italianate figures, startlingly nude in a Haggadah, blow their golden trumpets across the corners of a decorated four-quartered square behind the matzah. They’re seated against masts topped by painted banners under foliage scrolls. A klezmer group of five stands within an arcade below playing instruments of various interesting kinds.
What’s the background to this imagery? By the 14th century Spanish Jewry’s “Golden Age” of Solomon ibn Gabirol and Judah Halevi had become no more than a cherished memory following the Christian “reconquista”. Though guided by distinguished scholars such as Nachmanides, Jews lived in increasingly difficult circumstances as vassals of the kings of Castile and Aragon.
That reality’s reflected in the four Senyera coats-of-arms inserted within this matzah. David Abudarham tells us the Jews of his time “bless the king” every Shabbat as we do. Unlike us, however, they had need of royal protection against a populace often roused to hostility by a militant Church.
Compulsory Jewish attendance at sermons by, and disputations with, Dominican and Franciscan friars provoked communal anguish and frequent losses to baptism. The coincidence of Pesach with Holy Week sometimes led to violence. There was bloodshed during the Black Death of 1348/9.
How does our patron respond to these burdens? Characteristically, he focuses not on those but on our people’s promised renewal as echoed in the “Ge’ulah” blessing of redemption closing this part of the Haggadah.
His imagery shows four trumpets suggesting the “four winds” of our dispersal from which we will be brought back to our land (Ezekiel 37:9), as pledged in the haftarah of Shabbat Chol Hamo’ed. The square represents the diagrammatic Earth from whose “four corners” we will return, while the banners lifted high behind the uppermost trumpet players signal Israel’s rebirth, both in Isaiah 11:12.
The harp or lyre played —simultaneously! — by the trumpeter at top left suggests the eight-stringed instrument of the rebuilt Temple (BT Arachin 13b), while the instrumentalists below play the Hallel of redemption (Isaiah 51:3). The four vacant shields on the matzah between the crests of Aragon remain to be completed with King David’s Lion of Judah emblem once he reigns again as promised in Ezekiel 37:24.
But what of that nudity? When dealing with Exodus 1:7 the Haggadah explains Egyptian oppression in terms of helpless nakedness. Yet there’s no vulnerability here. The matzah’s surrounded by musicians playing almost defiantly in the buff.
It’s the trumpeted music of a people wholly free on Seder night, and reflects the community’s determined resistance to the Church’s relentlessly preached doctrines such as matzah as the bread of the Eucharist.
It’s deeply subversive, as indeed is much else shown in this Haggadah.
Furthermore, as the man gesturing at us with his two Matzot can’t wait to tell us — it’s Seder night, after all — there’s another story here, set to music of a wholly different kind.
Every part of that imagery has a double meaning. Our page celebrates, simultaneously, Jewish accomplishments in the sciences, derived from the talmudic suggestion (BT Shabbat 75a) that the study of the heavens is a mitzvah like any other. It’s symbolised here by Pythagoras’s “Musica Universalis”, famously discussed by Maimonides 200 years earlier in his Guide for the Perplexed (1:72/2:8).
That concept suggests that, in orbiting Earth, the then known heavenly bodies comprising Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, each travelling on an unseen sphere (BT Pesachim 94b), generate astronomical “music”. Shakespeare, for example, waxes lyrical at Act 5, Scene 1 of The Merchant of Venice about the “orb” that “in his motion like an angel sings”.
Thrust by the trumpeters’ Four Winds, the constellation traverses the seven concentric rings around the matzah as the cosmos, to create the universal harmony of the ensemble below, (much like a set of rotating babushka nesting balls playing the incidental music to, say, A Space Odyssey.)
That idea, to be replaced 300 years later by Galileo’s solar system as we know it, is conveyed in this patron’s spirited reminder to his Seder guests, as well as to us, that mediaeval Christian Europe would know nothing of the Graeco-Muslim sciences were it not for the scholarly contributions and translations of the Jews of Sepharad.
It’s a compelling portrait of an entire Jewish world, recalling the talmudic passage (BT Avodah Zarah 10b) in which a Jew-hating Roman emperor is warned by one of his counsellors that, just as the planet cannot exist without the four winds (Zechariah 2:10), so it cannot survive without Israel.
In the end the counsellor is executed for his “disrespect” to Caesar, though not before he becomes a Jew, Keti’ah bar Shalom.
But that’s a whole new story for another Seder night.
Eli Abt writes on the Jewish arts
