Adam Cohen: The Passover Haggadah Through the Centuries

Adam Cohen (University of Toronto), gives a lecture on his research here at Duke, entitled "The Passover Haggadah Through the Centuries."No book in Jewish history has been decorated more often than the Haggadah. Authors over two millennia have written countless commentaries on the text, but the pictures included in Haggadot over the last seven hundred years serve no less as commentaries, both to the seder itself and to Jewish history in general. Unlike their more traditional textual counterparts, Haggadah images function not only as intellectual materials, but also as visual statements meant to attract the eye and engage the viewer on an aesthetic level. This illustrated lecture highlights the most important examples from the mysterious Birds Head and Sarajevo Haggadahs of the fourteenth century to the numerous illustrated Haggadahs from post-World War II North America and the State of Israel. The lecture will also look at the proliferation of contemporary Haggadot decorated by the world¿s foremost Jewish artists, many commissioned specifically by patrons as incomparable objets d¿art.