Although Passover started on Saturday,to celebrate liberation of Hebrew ppl. from opression,slavery &tyranny ,its not too late ,to wish them happy pass over.
http://www10.nytimes.com/2001/04/07/national/07BELI.html?searchpv=site02
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April 7, 2001
Beliefs
By PETER STEINFELS
Join a Discussion on Religion in America
athered tonight and tomorrow around tables all over the world to
celebrate Passover, Jews will pick up hundreds of versions of the
Haggadah. Containing biblical texts, prayers, ritual directions,
explanations and songs for the annual reimagining of the ancient
Israelites’ liberation from slavery, the Haggadah is one book and many
books.
Much has been made of the politically radical, feminist, vegetarian,
even Disneyfied Haggadot (“The Prince of Egypt”) that have been
published in recent years, along with “family” versions oriented toward
children, versions with illuminations from medieval Jewish manuscripts,
versions accompanied by scholarly or literary commentary.
Since Johann Gutenberg perfected his printing press 550 years ago, at
least 4,000 printed editions of the Passover Haggadah have appeared.
Before that, there were centuries of hand-lettered and illuminated
manuscripts.
In “Haggadah and History” (Jewish Publication Society, 1975), a survey
of printed Haggadot from the collections of Harvard University and the
Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi shows
that despite the relatively unchanging ritual of the Seder, Haggadot
were always interacting with changing environments.
Reissued in 1997, Mr. Yerushalmi’s book, with 200 black-and-white plates
from four centuries of Haggadot, shows the remarkable continuity in
illustrated Passover themes: the pre-Passover search with candle and
feather to remove all minute crumbs of anything leavened, people baking
matzo, the 13 stages of the Seder celebration, the 10 plagues inflicted
on Pharaoh’s Egypt, the 4 questioning sons (wise, wicked, simple and
unable even to ask the question).
But in the early centuries of printing, within this continuity, were
fascinating changes and borrowings. An illustration in the great Prague
Haggadah of 1526 shows Abraham crossing the Euphrates River in a
rowboat. In later editions from Venice and Mantua, Italy, the rowboat
metamorphoses into a gondola.
Renderings of the Temple frequently take their shape from the Dome of
the Rock mosque. Renaissance printings of the Haggadah feature borrowed
border designs rife with squirming putti or portraying Mars, Minerva and
other classical deities that Jews had once abhorred but now considered
mere decoration.
In a 1560 Haggadah, a portrait of the wise son, traditionally
represented by a mature figure with a beard, is an unabashed copy of
Michelangelo’s portrayal of the prophet Jeremiah in the Sistine Chapel.
In another Haggadah, printed a few years later, the Jeremiah figure is
labeled a wise elder replying to the wise son, and then, on another
page, is presented as the Rabbi El’azar ben Azariah, a sage quoted in
the Haggadah and known for his long white beard.
The copperplate engravings illustrating one of the most pictorially
influential Haggadot, printed in Amsterdam in 1695, turn out to be
reworkings by a convert to Judaism from Christianity of a Swiss
Christian artist’s engravings of events from biblical and Roman history.
Jews and Jewish printers were constantly being hounded out of this or
that part of Europe, but artistically they were anything but isolated
from the contemporary culture.
The author traces Jewish history not only in the illustrations of the
Haggadah but also in the added translations of the Hebrew text. Editions
began appearing with translations in the various tongues, like Ladino
and Yiddish, that were written in Hebrew but married the language to
Italian, Spanish or German.
From North Africa to Central Asia, from Denmark to Iraq, Haggadot were
tailored to the languages of Jewish communities. The Haskala, the
militant Jewish Enlightenment movement that advocated entering the
European cultural mainstream, campaigned for Haggadot with modern
European languages.
An 1846 Haggadah for Jews in Bombay features illustrations derived from
forerunners printed in Amsterdam and Venice centuries before, but the
Hebrew is accompanied with explanations in Marathi characters. By 1874,
a Haggadah from Poona, India, not only had Marathi translations but also
distinctly Indian illustrations.
Adding translations and integrating commentaries into the Haggadah
presented new challenges in typography and design. Even today, when
color printing and the flexibility of computer graphics and composition
make it much easier to separate the different elements, some Haggadot
can be a chore to follow.
“Haggadah and History” does not hesitate to include a few parodies and
worse. In 1885, underpaid Hebrew teachers in Odessa, Ukraine, produced a
parody asking, “How does teaching differ from all other professions in
the world?” The answer involved hunger, student disruptions and abuse
from the community.
A 1927 Soviet “Haggadah for Believers and Atheists” is in a different
category. In place of the traditional pronouncement over the burning of
leaven, the Communist text urged that “all the aristocrats, bourgeois
and their helpers” — a long list of “counterrevolutionaries” was
inserted here, including Mensheviks, Jewish socialists and Zionists —
“be consumed in the fire of the revolution.” If any
counterrevolutionaries remained, like the invisible specks of leaven,
the Communist text consigned them to the secret police.
This Haggadah denounced Passover itself as a trick of rabbis rather than
a festival of freedom.
The Haggadot from the Holocaust years and from the years of postwar
mourning in Europe and building in Israel are charged with history.
It was on the verge of that tragedy, however, that the most powerful
images of the Passover struggle of good and evil, slavery, arrogance,
bloodshed and retribution, seemed to fill the Haggadot. The peril had
gripped talent without yet overwhelming it.
The reproductions in “Haggadah and History” from efforts by the Polish
artist Joseph Budko in 1921 and Jacob Steinhardt in Berlin in 1923, by
Istvan Zador in Budapest in 1924 and Otto Geismar in Berlin in 1928
replace conventional treatments with the jarring resources of modernism
and contrasting, ominous uses of black and white.
When Mr. Yerushalmi wrote “Haggadah and History,” he said of his
subject: “Scholars have meditated upon it, children delight in it. A
book for philosophers and for the folk, it has been reprinted more often
and in more places than any other Jewish classic.”
“The Haggadah,” he wrote, “is in many ways the most popular and beloved
of Jewish books.”
"jo kHat main kahte they apni jaan mujhko
aaj kHat likhne main unki jaan jaati hai …