Bird’s Head Haggadah Revealed - Richard McBee on Marc Michael Epstein

By: Richard McBee

Published: March 29th, 2012

 

Bird’s Head Haggadah Revealed 
The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative & Religious Imagination. 

By Marc Michael Epstein, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2011

The Dura Europos synagogue murals (245 CE) evidenced the first great flowering of Jewish visual creativity, quickly followed by the creation of at least 17 synagogue mosaic floors in Palestine. The next efflorescence of Jewish art was found in illuminated manuscript production in Spain and Germany over 600 years later. In The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative & Religious Imagination (2011), Marc Michael Epstein explores four seminal medieval Haggadot as paradigms of the creative relationship between sacred text and the Jewish visual imagination. 

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The Medieval Haggadah - Marc Michael Epstein at the JCC

Shoshannah Brombacher & Yona Verwer presenting at the Jewish Museum

Two Jewish Art Salon members, Shoshannah Brombacher and Yona Verwer, will be presenting at the Jewish Museum. 

Brombacher will discuss The Portuguese (Marano) Jewish Community in 17th century Amsterdam; and Gravestone inscriptions at Bet Haim cemetery.

Verwer will speak about The Jewish Art Salon, her own art, and Dutch Jewish art today.

Travel U: The Jews of The Netherlands Monday November 7, 2011 Learn the little-known history of Jewish communities in The Netherland from the Renaissance to present day.

Speakers include: Dr. Jane Gerber, Director, Institute for Sephardic Studies, City University of New York Dr. Raymond Scheindlin, professor of Medieval Hebrew Literature at The Jewish Theological Seminary Janice Meyerson, Mezzo-soprano Dr. Shoshannah Brombacher, Artist, author, academic researcher, and Maggida Dr. Marc Michael Epstein, Professor of Religion, Vassar Salomon L. Vaz Dias Cantor Josee Wolff Yona Verwer, Artist and President, Jewish Art Salon

Marc Michael Epstein's Medieval Haggadah

In his new work, The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative and Religious Imagination, (Yale University Press 2011), Marc Michael Epstein explores four enigmatic, quirky, and interesting illuminated haggadot—manuscripts created for Jewish use at the home service of Passover Eve. These stunningly beautiful books include the earliest-known surviving illuminated haggadah, the Birds’ Head Haggadah, made in Mainz around 1300, in which many of the faces on the human figures depicted throughout the work are replaced with those of birds; the Golden Haggadah, from Barcelona, circa 1320-30,  the iconography of which seems so indisputably “formed in the image and likeness” of contemporary manuscripts made for Christians; and two Spanish “siblings,” the Rylands Haggadah and its so-called Brother, made between 1330 and 1340, which have historically been paired because of the similarity of their iconography and style.