The David Moss Haggadah, [Jerusalem and Berkeley], 1980-1984

The original manuscript of “one of the most beautiful works in the history of the Jewish book.”

The David Moss Haggadah is a modern masterpiece of Hebrew manuscript illumination. Tasked by Richard and Beatrice Levy with creating a fairly large-format, handwritten and hand-illuminated rendition of the classical Passover Seder liturgy in a traditional style, renowned Judaica artist David Moss devoted three years on three continents to full-time work researching, conceiving, and executing his commission. The resulting volume, which comprises the present lot, combines intellectual creativity, imaginative playfulness, deeply learned iconography, graceful calligraphy, and skillful artistry to magnificent effect.

Much of the Haggadah’s guiding ethos derives from Moss’s personal experience of exile and exodus, as he and his family made aliyyah (immigrated to Israel) from California during the period of its production. In a similar vein, the book also echoes with the footsteps of national redemption, drawing as it does on the artistic traditions of Ashkenazic, Sephardic, Italian, and Mizrahi Jewries in the spirit of “the ingathering of the exiles” initiated by the Zionist movement and the establishment of the State of Israel. Thus, the text used is that of the Ashkenazic Haggadah, but the repeated representation of the Temple implements pays homage to medieval Catalonian Hebrew Bibles, while the page devoted to the eating of the afikoman at the end of the Seder meal is meant to evoke Kurdish Jewish art and custom.

One of the great joys of studying this Haggadah—and it truly must be studied to be appreciated at its full depth—is uncovering the layers of symbolism and meaning that suffuse every section. For example, the opening containing the text of the Kiddush recited at the beginning of the Seder channels the tradition of many medieval and early modern Haggadot to depict a hare hunt at this juncture in the ritual. The reason for this seemingly incongruous scene is apparently based on a linguistic pun: the acronym yaknehaz, used as a mnemonic for the blessings recited when the Seder is held on a Saturday night, sounds like the German phrase jage den Hasen (hunt the hare). Here, Moss has reinterpreted this element of traditional Ashkenazic iconography in a distinctly modern key, reproducing the coats of arms or emblems of regimes that have, at various points in history, persecuted their Jewish subjects, pursuing them in the same manner that the eagle pursues the hare. The oppressors include Emperors Antiochus Epiphanes, Vespasian, and Hadrian, Popes Innocent III and Clement IV, the cities of Trent and Auschwitz, and the Polish, Tsarist, and German states, culminating, of course, with the Nazis’ Third Reich. Perhaps not coincidentally, an eagle centers all of these regimes’ seals, and in the spirit of the hare hunt Moss has inserted a rabbit into the talons or beaks of each. But in the final roundel at the bottom-left of the page, the hare escapes, much as the Jew has always managed to outlast his pursuers and spring to freedom, represented here by the she-hehiyyanu blessing of renewal found on the facing leaf.

The Moss Haggadah thus both gives elegant expression to some of the central themes of the Exodus story and constitutes a clever, erudite, highly allusive visual commentary on Jewish history and memory in the Diaspora and in the Land of Israel. It is, furthermore, a thing of beauty that innovatively integrates inlaid mirrors, gouaches, acrylics, egg tempera, burnished gold leaf, calligraphy, micrography, and parchment-cuts. Small wonder, then, that Moss was awarded the Israel Museum’s Jesselson Prize for Contemporary Judaica in part for this unique Haggadah. Indeed, when, in October 1988, the New York Public Library put on a path-breaking exhibit on the history of the Hebrew book, only one Haggadah manuscript created after 1717 was selected for inclusion: the David Moss Haggadah.

Physical Description

48 folios on Israeli- and English-made parchment, 4 folios (ff. 9, 12, 36-37) on gray or white C.M. Fabriano Italia handmade paper (approx. 17 7/8 x 11 5/8 in.; approx. 455 x 295 mm) (collation: i⁶, ii⁸, iii-v⁶, vi⁸, vii-viii⁶), f. 1 blank except for copyright information and folio number; contemporary foliation in pencil in Arabic numerals in upper-outer corner of rectos; ruled in blind, prickings often visible in outer edges; text written in commercial Chinese and India black inks; artist’s note in pencil in Hebrew in lower edge of f. 19v; tissue guards placed between some folios. Numerous painted miniatures and designs using gouaches, acrylics, and/or egg tempera; extensive use of pure gold leaf over prepared or handmade gesso; text often painted in color; five folios (ff. 4, 10-11, 13, 34) parchment-cut; two paper foldouts (ff. 40v-41r); pricking used for design purposes in lower margins of ff. 47-50. Slight scattered staining; some cockling; minor abrasion of gold leaf and thinning of paint in places; minor periodic paint transfers (see, e.g., ff. 9r, 12v, 25v-26r); small natural parchment imperfection in lower margin of f. 17. Original, crushed, alum-tawed white goatskin, the covers with a wide, blind-stamped knotwork frame, by Yehuda McClaff (Miklaf); flat, unlettered spine; white C.M. Fabriano Italia paper flyleaves and pastedowns. Housed in a white folding case, somewhat soiled and scuffed, especially at edges; title, artist name, and year lettered in gilt on upper board.

Literature

Leila Avrin, “A Survey of Twentieth Century Artistic Haggadot,” AB Bookman’s Weekly 79,12 (March 23, 1987): 1210-1220, at p. 1220.

Marc Michael Epstein, The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative, and Religious Imagination (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2011), 1-2.

Leonard Singer Gold (ed.), A Sign and a Witness: 2,000 Years of Hebrew Books and Illuminated Manuscripts (New York: The New York Public Library; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 134, 201 (no. 44).

Grace Cohen Grossman, Jewish Art (New York: Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, Inc., 1995), 267.

David Moss, “Creating Culture, Cultural Creation: A Personal Artistic View,” in Yehuda Sarna (ed.), Developing a Jewish Perspective on Culture (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 2011), 367-380, at pp. 373-378.

Ira Steingroot, “New World Seder,” Tikkun 7,2 (March/April 1992): 24-25.

Etarae B. Weinstein, “The Moss Haggadah: A Contemporary Heirloom,” Moment (April 1990): 34-35.