A Passover Story: The Fabulous Journey of the "Haggadah of Rothschild" from Medieval Italy and Nazi Plunder in Israel

The Nazis liked to burn books, but they were not fooled: during their bloody advance in Europe, while imposing their domination, they killed those who resisted and sent the local Jews literally like cattle in the concentration camps, they have never missed the opportunity to steal valuables, including ancient manuscripts.
And, with all the hatred that they held towards the Jews, they did not dodge the risk of adding to their booty liturgical elements in Hebrew, as, for example, an incunable. Haggadah, the book that establishes the order of "Seder", the meal of the reunion and the family that marks the beginning of the Pbadover, with his recitations and songs reminiscent of slavery in Egypt and liberation under the direction of Moses.

During the occupation of Paris, the the crazy greed of the Nazis It was cruel and exquisite. The theft of magnificent works of art of incalculable value in the French capital – and in many other European cities – is narrated by many historians, novels and Hollywood films.

The story of the "less known"Haggadah Rothschild", a copy of the ritual book handwritten by a medieval scribe who was part of the European multimillionaire Jewish family's art collection, was stolen by the Nazis, mysteriously found by an American soldier and is today one of the most valuable books of the National Library of Israel.

A book that has come a long way from northern Italy Medieval to the current Israeli Jerusalem.

As established by the experts of the National Library, which centuries later would be called "Hagadá Rothschild", was reproduced by hand by a scribe named Yehuda and takes the drawings of a famous illustrator of his time called Yoel ben Shimon, active in the cities of Cremona and Modena in the second half of the fifteenth century.

Richly illustrated, the fax pages of the "Hagadá Rothschild" can be viewed online on the library's website. This is an Ashkenazi version of the ritual book and the drawings have a marked local and contemporary flavor: Ben Shimon features characters dressed in medieval clothing and, for example, the Egyptian cities of Python and Ramses look like Italian fortresses.

Modern printing is still in its infancy (Gutenberg developed his system around 1439, Ben Shimon's time, illustrating manuscripts), there existed in medieval northern Italy two types of professional scribes, the Christians of the monasteries and the Jews in their neighborhoods.

Little is known about Yehuda, the author of the calligraphy of the "Hagadá Rothschild", especially because the Jews were more literate and educated than the rest of the population and that there were a lot of people able to reproduce a text. Then came the job of illustrating it.

A Jew could hire a non-Jew like "illuminator"as are also known to those who have decorated these books", to create beautiful images of a biblical scene or a family around a table, flowers or animals, and there are certainly many examples of Hebrew manuscripts in Europe illustrated by Christian Artists, but this was not the case "because for the" Haggadah Rothschild ", Yehuda says Ben Shimon, a fellow believer, explained to Infobae Professor Yoel Finkelman, curator of the Judaica collection of the National Library.

In addition to the Egyptian fortified cities in the Italian and the Jews of Exodus dressed in the fashion of the Middle Ages, Ben Shimon left other mysterious "pearls" in his drawings for this Haggadah. For example, when designing theillustrations for the story of the four children who ask questions during the "Seder".

In this story, there are four very different children: the wise, the simple, a half bad and one who does not know how to ask questions. For centuries, theories about these children have been developed, representing different points of view within Jewish philosophy or different personalities that a human being can badume during his lifetime.

Ben Shimon contributed to the fifteenth century to his ironic look and drew the wise son in a pose not very wise: with a finger in the nose. And he also inserted into the Haggadah the drawing of a person who, presumably, is not Jewish and who gets drunk by grilling in a bonfire a little animal that looks like a pig, something very little kosher , by the way.

With his beautiful calligraphy and mocking illustrations, the manuscript went into a centuries-old silence until a member of the Rothschild family detects it and acquires it for the antiques collection. . According to the criticism of Professor Daniel Lipson, also from the National Library, the Haggadah was bought by the baron Edmond de Rothschild, who has continued to add manuscripts to the collection created by his grandfather, the German banker Mayer Amschel.

Edmond, known among the Jews as "the great benefactor"In 1934 he died and left his collection of works of art because of his steadfast support for Zionism and the charitable causes of the community." James, the eldest son, emigrated to England before the First World War, sent an expert to France to evaluate the collection and organize the division with his brothers Maurice and Miriam, alias Alexandrine.

"After the distribution of the manuscripts among the brothers, for reasons that are still mysterious, James Rothschild decided to leave six Hebrew manuscripts of the collection, including Hagadot (plural of Haggadah), in France."said Lipson.

Why did wealthy men like the Rothschilds develop an addiction to Hagadot and other Jewish ritual books?

"The family, visibly extremely rich and influential in the Jewish and non-Jewish circles of Europe, was very interested in rare books and manuscripts," of Hebrew and Christian origin, Finkelman notes.

"Books and manuscripts are a means of not only exposing wealth, but also style, education, good taste and attachment to high culture," he continues, "Antiquities show the sophistication of their collectors, their knowledge, their roots in the past, all the elements that were undoubtedly present in the motives of the family "to ambad such a collection.

And these are perhaps elements similar to those that led to the Nazi loot Jewish families and accumulate their own collections, but without investing money, only at gunpoint and at the price of blood.

"When the Nazis entered Paris on June 14, 1940, they immediately turned to the local rich," Lipson said.. Nazi looters have mostly stolen the properties of so-called "hostile" targets, such as Jews"He continued.

Shortly after the end of the occupation of Paris, "the chief ideologue of the Nazi party, Alfred Rosenberg, sent two representatives to locate and collect the libraries of these "hostile entities" – says Lipson -. It was Walter Gruta, one of the directors of the National Socialist Party's Higher School (a sort of executive university) and Wilhelm Grau, director of the Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question. .

Maurice Rothschild he had hidden the manuscripts from the family collection in a safe of a Parisian bank, where he thought that they would be safe. But on January 21, 1941, the Nazis entered the boxes and took the treasures that were stored there.

According to Lipson, a German official "would have left a receipt at the bank where the date would have been fixed and would have carried the contents of six boxes, including the Haggadah written in the Middle Ages by the Jew Yehuda and illustrated by his compatriot Yoel ben Shimon.

This group of operations led by Rosenberg was taken from Parishundreds of stolen books from the Rothschild collection and other wealthy familiesas well as institutions like the local rabbinical seminar. The books were taken away to Germany, including at the Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question in Frankfurt and at the University of the Paintings in Berlin.

Little is known about why the Nazis wanted the ritual books of the Jews. Maybe it was a way to destroy the enemy, to study it to better destroy it. The truth is that after a few months in the hands of Nazi "scholars", the books began to be evacuated as the Allied bombs began to fall.

Much of the books and manuscripts were taken to smaller cities, such as Hangenin Germany, where they were discovered by American soldiers, or Tanzenberg, in Austria, where the British found them. Also at Raciborzin Poland, where they found themselves in the hands of the Soviets.

The Russians sent the books to Minsk and one Moscow and this is only in the 90s, when the Soviet regime fell, began to return them to those who were stolen by the Nazis. The Americans and the British did the same thing but barely finished the war and not completely.
Many valuables recovered from Nazi warehouses were "lost in the road", were left in the backpack of officers or soldiers as almost innocent memories or enriched the smugglers allies.

For example, the "Haggadah Rothschild"appears in a huge volume that the French authorities prepared after the war with lists of objects stolen by the Nazis during the occupation, but it has never been among the materials recovered from German warehouses.

But in 1948, an American doctor named Fred Murphy given to the collection of rare books of the Yale University an old Haggadah Little is known about the origin of the manuscript by Murphy, but only on the last page, a small stamp bearing the name "William V. Black"

Expert investigations revealed that several US soldiers sent to Europe during World War II were named as such. And it is thought that this black soldier, or acquaintance or friend, would have taken the manuscript to the United States, where it reached Murphy's hands.

Just in 1980 Professor James Marrow, from the Art Department of Princeton University, identified the manuscript as being the lost "Hagadá Rothschild". As James Rothschild died in 1957, Yale handed over the Haggadah to his widow. Dorothy, who lived in England and decided to donate the manuscript to the National Library of Jerusalem.

To add a little more mystery, there were three pages missing from the manuscript, two of which appeared in 2007 at an auction in Paris. The dealer who bought them sent them to Jerusalem for examination. It was established that they were part of the "Hagadá Rothschild" and it was decided to buy them to reunite them with the manuscript.

Today, the Hagadot – which began to circulate among the Jews after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, in the year 70 of the Christian era, in order to continue to recall in a "portable" way "The story of Exodus the exiles – they are basically the same as those reproduced by Yehuda scribe about 550 years ago with a neat handwriting.

Hagadot worth thousands of dollars, and those obtained in the form of pennies or free pamphlets on the Internet, say the same thing, and it will be the same on Friday night during the Seder of 2019, 5779 of the Jewish calendar.

In each one of them, you can read that on the first night of Pbadover "We talked about freedom without mentioning Moses because we do not want to depend on leaders for our liberation / We have accomplished, as the Haggadah says, seeing us as if we had left Egypt / We l '. did, what no one can do for us"