Katrin Kogman-Appel, University of Münster

Most readers of this blog know what the haggadah is: a small book, oftentimes illustrated or at least decorated, kept in Jewish households in numerous copies, which contains the liturgy to be recited during the Passover seder. Nowadays, every participant will hold one of these books during the annual evening ritual. Those who do not know Hebrew will have a copy that includes the text in transliteration together with a translation. The Hebrew word haggadah (הגדה) means an act of telling. At some point, the term began to be used to refer to a more or less standardized text to be recited during the ceremony, but it was only in the early modern period that the word “haggadah” began to mean a book, an object.
My current project tells the history of this object—the haggadah as a book. Much has been written about the Passover haggadah and its development as a text. Much less has been said about its history as a book. It is not entirely clear exactly when the haggadah—as a text—was composed. As it consists of numerous sections that betray tannaitic style and language and thus hark back to late antiquity; as a liturgical unit, it can be traced to the 10th century at the latest. Part of the statutory liturgy, it was originally included in the regular prayer book, but when we open a modern siddur, the haggadah is no longer there, for at some point it was separated from the siddur and emerged as an individually bound book. Some early scholars presumed that independent haggadot existed ever since the haggadah appeared as a text in the rabbinic period. However, others realized that independent haggadot only began to circulate in the 13th century and assumed that by the 14th they were available in most Jewish households. In contrast, students of early Jewish print culture find the striking scarcity of printed haggadot from the 15th and 16th centuries puzzling.
My first step was to map out the appearance of stand-alone haggadot in the late medieval and the early modern Jewish world. The fact that talmudic sources describing the Passover ritual use the word “אמר,” to say or to speak, instead of “קרא,” to read, indicates that reciting the haggadah from memory rather than from a written text was the norm. This terminology, in connection with the recitation of the haggadah, was common until the late 13th century and even beyond. A quantitative assessment of surviving haggadot and common prayerbooks supports the assumption that the haggadah began to emerge as a separate book in the late 13th century. (1) At the same time, and more interestingly, this assessment also clearly indicates that until the early 17th century, it was a rather rare type of book.
Knowing when this process began, I now have to determine how, at what pace, and—most importantly—why this happened. A quantitative evaluation of the extant liturgical material indicates that some seventy-eight percent of the haggadah texts copied anywhere in the Jewish world between 1200 and 1650 came in a siddur, and only twelve percent in this entire period were in stand-alone books.

Having realized that individually bound haggadot were not the norm, and then mapped out their presence in Jewish households in the period under discussion, my next step and main effort are to determine how and why that change in haggadot came about in the first place, especially in illustrated formats. Who were the (relatively few) people who actually used haggadot? How were they used? Every Jewish father had (and has) to tell the story of the Exodus to his offspring, no matter what his social or scholarly background is or was. Thus, the haggadah counts among the obligatory prayers. Most obligatory prayers for festivals are recited publicly in the synagogue, and one can fulfill the precept of praying by listening to a ritual agent, but this is not true of the haggadah, which is recited privately in one’s home on the occasion of a family meal without the aid of such an agent.
What my project will show is that even though the text and its basic liturgical function remain the same, as far as its recitation is concerned, as material objects individual haggadot functioned differently from those that came as part of the general prayer book. This perspective on the medieval haggadah approaches it as an object, a material artefact. Codicology is an important tool with which to come to terms with questions regarding the materiality of a book. It concentrates information about the size of any given book, the type of its script, and the density of the text as written, thus offering important insight into the nature of a book beyond issues of its making and its origin within a certain region, and so on. After collecting this kind of information, I will then move on to the users of the haggadah, its readerships, and the ways they utilized the book as a ritual aid. In other words, my approach focuses on those material features that afford certain kinds of use. Thus, my project will shed light on the social and cultural processes that engendered the detachment of the haggadah (often as an illuminated codex) from the general prayer book, which, as I understand it, was a long-term evolution between the 13th and the 17th centuries rather than a sudden phenomenon. My working hypothesis is that the individually bound haggadah emerged because, in an age that saw the increasing scriptualization of Jewish societies, some people were no longer prepared to memorize the haggadah and needed a small volume to rely on during the festival. Although they had been used in preparation for the oral recitation of the haggadah, thick and heavy siddurim were clearly not suitable for use during a ritual that included a meal. These factors determined the character the haggadah would adopt in all areas of the Jewish Diaspora. This process, however, differed from place to place, and a comparative approach to the material will determine the differences in the pace in which the haggadah emerged, its regional circumstances, and its uses. Artistic embellishments (at least in some areas and some social strata) were meant as aids to help cope with the requirement of proper ritual performance and, thus, represented a central aspect of the haggadah as a ritual object. The way this imagery functioned will be the subject of several chapters in a monograph on the history of the Haggadah.
Notes
(1) Material retrieved from the Cairo Genizah revealed numerous medieval fragments of the haggadah. Originally, they were all approached as remains of stand-alone haggadot but a closer look disclosed that most of them may well have been parts of siddurim. A small group of fragments from the 11th and the 12th centuries indicates that some unprofessional scribes copied the text into small booklets, perhaps for their own use during the seder, but this practice does not seem to have been too widespread.
Katrin Kogman-Appel is a Professor of Jewish Studies at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster. Previously she taught at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (1996–2015). She has published work on ancient and medieval Jewish art and is particularly interested in Hebrew manuscript illumination and its cultural and social contexts. In 2015 she won an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship.
She is the author of Jewish Book Art Between Islam and Christianity (Brill 2004), and of Illuminated Haggadot from Medieval Spain (Pennsylvania State University Press 2007), which won the Premio del Rey Prize of the American Historical Association in 2009. A Mahzor from Worms. Art and Religion in a Medieval Jewish Community, a monograph on the Leipzig Mahzor (Harvard University Press, 2012) was a finalist of the National Jewish Book Award (scholarship). Her most recent monograph is Catalan Maps and Jewish Books. The Intellectual Profile of Elisha ben Abraham Cresques (1325–1387) (Brepols, 2020). She is currently preparing a monograph on the Passover Haggadah and its ritual uses as a stand-alone book.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Andreas Lehnertz (December 26, 2022). The Emergence of the Passover Haggadah as a Book Genre. medievalJewishStudiesNow! Retrieved July 8, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/rhwt