The oldest extant illuminated manuscript of the Haggadah—the odd title derives from its drawings of humans with the heads of birds—has been in the possession of the Israel Museum for seven decades, and normally goes on display around Passover. But it came to the museum under irregular circumstances, and now Eli Barzilai, whose German-Jewish grandparents possessed the manuscript when the Nazis came to power, is seeking restitution. The Associated Press reports:

Written in southern Germany around 1300 by a scribe identified only as Menaḥem, the Bird’s-Head Haggadah has long been a riddle. . . . Much of the enigma surrounds its strange illustrations of Jewish figures. [The scholar Marc Michael] Epstein believes the heads on the figures are those of griffins, beloved mythical creatures, and the drawings were meant to offer a positive representation of Jews while skirting a biblical prohibition against depicting human likenesses.

Barzilai says the 14th-century Haggadah was a wedding gift from his grandmother’s family to his grandfather, Ludwig Marum, a lawyer from the German town of Karlsruhe who served in Germany’s parliament and opposed Hitler. The Nazis paraded Marum and other opponents across town before taking them away. Marum was later killed at the Kislau concentration camp.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.