Composed in the city of Milan and richly illuminated, the Lombard Haggadah is the oldest known stand-alone Italian manuscript of the seder liturgy. Susan Moore describes the artifact, which will be on display in New York City next week:

[The Haggadah’s] seder illustrations are essentially domestic, familial images: we witness the preparation of the meal, prayers and blessings, the ritual of hand-washing, readings, and scenes of the table of seated figures and of the meal itself. Some 75 pale, delicate—and damaged—watercolor washes over pen and ink outlines occupy the margins of almost every page. . . . Particularly striking is one elegant servant in fashionable bi-colored garments—one pointed leg clothed in pink hose, the other in red—bearing an enormous bunch of maror, the bitter herbs that are an essential part of the sacred meal, intended to symbolize the bitterness of enslavement.

It seems probable that the manuscript was made for a wealthy Jewish individual during the last decade of the 14th century, a period that saw a wave of immigration of northern European Jews to Lombardy, but not to the city of Milan itself, as a result of the welcome extended by Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti. Its figures and imagery are entirely characteristic of the international gothic style, and what is fascinating is that it is essentially no different from Christian Latin manuscripts of the same period in terms of execution, presentation or detail, even if the script and specific narratives differ. . . .

The manuscript also peculiarly, if not uniquely, depicts the Labors of the Month, [a common medieval motif involving depictions of activities associated with each month]. The scenes of agricultural work represented in this visual calendar are a curious inclusion given that urban Jews [almost never owned land] and presumably did not slaughter pigs in December.

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.