Thursday, March 23, 2023
Elder of Ziyon
They have two illuminated siddurim (prayer books), both of which include Passover Haggadot. Since they are not standalone, they seem to be more obscure than some of the more famous illuminated Haggadot.
The more interesting one, from the 14th or 15th century CE, doesn't even have a name - it is an incomplete siddur, missing many pages, and its drawings are a bit faded - but it is a very impressive work, especially since the entire siddur is illuminated.
The word "אומר" in this section seems to use a concatenation of the "mem" and "resh" as a single letter, a ligature I had never seen before (you can see on the last line the more well-known "aleph-lamed" ligature, while rarely used today it is part of the Unicode font set.)
I just did a brief search and I cannot find any mention of a mem-resh ligature, so maybe I (and jamie t) made a real discovery. That's the sort of thing that can launch entire academic papers.
The Cambridge notes mention that a couple of sections were crudely blacked out, and they theorize this is because of fear of Christian censors. I'm not so sure - the Haggadah's "שפוך חמתך" is not touched, and one would think that would be the first section to be censored.
Since it has more than a Haggadah, we can see pictures like this one of Moses at the beginning of Pirke Avot!
Who wrote it? We don't know, but in the Grace After Meals there are crowns over the names "Abraham" and "Isaac" with a small note saying that this was the scribe and the person who inserted the vowels - so it appears that one was named Avraham and the other Yitzhak.
Now, that's humility.
