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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Ken Goldman and Haggadot.com

DIY Matzoh Baking

Haggadot.com offers a unique way to to create a more personalized Passover experience. It provides access to classical texts and contemporary interpretations to make your own haggadah.

For each section of the haggadah, you may upload original writings, artwork, or scan in selections from non-copyrighted haggadot. You may borrow content from other users and mix and match pages. When finished you make a PDF and print copies for you and your guests. 

Check out the highly original contributions by Ken Goldman. Goldman recently presented at a Jewish Art Salon session and the audience got a preview of some of his haggadah related work. Here is more: 

http://www.haggadot.com/contributors-details/3679

Photo courtesy Ken Goldman

For those of you who want to experience baking matzot on the run! 

1. upcycle an old television dish- add shoulder straps. 2. cover dish with lots of foil. 3. hang black pot with dough at just the right angel. 4. head out to your nearest desert at high noon! should take about an hour; goes great with charoset! 

Mark Podwal: Sharing the Journey

Opening reception - February 14 from 5:30 to 7:30 PM

This exhibition includes original works that illustrate  

Sharing the Journey: The Haggadah for the Contemporary Family
by Alan S. Yoffie, published by the CCAR Press, Division of
the Central Conference of American Rabbis, also available through the gallery.

Gallery Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 10 AM to 5:30 PM
  © Mark Podwal, courtesy of Forum Gallery, NY.


730 Fifth Avenue, NY, NY 10019
(212) 355-4545 www.forumgallery.com

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.