EXC 2060 X0-00 - A Fragmentary Haggadah for Sefardi Refugees in Istanbul (c. 1505) – Attempted Reconstruction

Basic data for this project

Description

The first illustrated Haggadah (liturgy for the Passover holiday) in print appeared around 1505 in the printing house of the brothers David and Samuel ibn Nahmias in Istanbul. It survived in thirty-nine paper fragments discovered in the Genizah in Cairo and due to its fragmentary state, was only marginally considered in the previous scholarship. However, it is of significant book-historical importance both as  evidence of early Hebrew printing and as the first printed Haggadah with pictures. It has been shown that these images were apparently commissioned in 1492 in the Christian workshop of Francesco del Tuppo in Naples, where the ibn Nahmias brothers had landed after their expulsion from Spain. However, political circumstances forced the brothers to move on to Istanbul, where the book could eventually be printed only in1505. Preliminary work in preparation for this project suggest that the Haggadah must have been printed in two editions (probably 1505 and 1514). Fourteen better preserved fragments are remnants of the first edition, while twenty-five others, in considerably poorer condition must have belonged to the second edition. The layout and pictorial program indicate that the book was conceived among several other book projects initiated by the Sefardi intellectual elite to help the Jewish expellees from Spain in 1492 to overcome the traumatic events associated with their expulsion and to establish new, ritually well-functioning communities. The project is aimed at reconstructing both editions of the Haggadah. While the fragments of the second edition (merely as small shreds of paper) allows only for a partial reconstruction, the first edition consists of several almost complete leaves, including two double leaves, which allow a much more complete reconstruction of the quires and thus of large parts of the book. The most suitable method for this endeavor is a codicological approach. This method was originally developed for the research of manuscripts, but under certain conditions it can also be applied to early printed books. Those fragments that were relatively well preserved yield information about the page layout and average wordcounts of the text portions on each page. This way it will be possible to determine and reconstruct the missing parts of the text. This process naturally requires taking into account also the wood cuts and the possibility that the original books contained even more images than those that we know of today.