The 17th-Century German Former Minister Whose Illustrations Graced America’s Best-Known Haggadah

Aware that Ashkenazi custom forbids the consumption of legumes on Passover, Maxwell House decided in 1932 to publish and distribute haggadot for the holiday—aiming to reassure Jews that coffee beans were not beans by either rabbinic or botanical standards. Henry Abramson tells the remarkable story of the artist behind the images reproduced in the early editions of this now-famous bilingual guide to the seder.

The . . . illustrations were taken from the classic Amsterdam Haggadah of 1695, the work of an unusual former German minister and convert to Judaism who took the name Abraham bar Jacob.

Only a few tantalizing details of bar Jacob’s life are preserved. Born in 1669, most likely in the Rhineland region of Germany, he moved at the age of twenty-six to liberal Amsterdam, where he studied Judaism and became a convert.

Bar Jacob’s illustrations were technically superior to the Venetian illustrations that were popular at the end of the 17th century. Freshly drawn on copper plate, they captured so much detail and emotion that they were reprinted in dozens of editions of haggadah over the next four centuries. . . .

While his artistic originality is demonstrated in complex images that detail biblical scenes such as the rescue of baby Moses from the Nile or the adult Moses striking the cruel Egyptian taskmaster, bar Jacob also had an ability to recognize powerful imagery elsewhere and incorporate it into the Jewish narrative. By modern standards, this would be considered plagiarism (or at least “sampling”), but it was standard fare in printing at the turn of the 18th century.

Read more at Jewish Star

More about: American Jewish History, Conversion, Haggadah, Jewish art

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society