Haggadah

The Haggadah (Hebrew: הגדה) contains the order of the Passover Seder. Haggadah, meaning "telling," is a fulfillment of the scriptural commandment to each Jew to "tell your son" about the Jewish liberation from slavery in Egypt, as described in the book of Exodus in the Torah.

Compiling of the Haggadah

According to Jewish tradition the Haggadah was compiled during the Mishnaic and Talmudic periods, but the exact time is not known.

The Haggadah could not have been written earlier than the time of Rabbi Yehudah bar Elaay (around 170 CE) who is the latest tanna to be quoted in the Haggadah. According to most Talmudic commentaries Rav and Shmuel argued on the compilation of the Haggadah, and hence it was not completed by that time.

However the Malbim, along with a minority of commentators believed that Rav and Shmuel were not arguing on its compilation but its interpretation and hence was completed by then. According to this explanation the Haggadah was written during the lifetime of Rav Yehudah haNasi, the compiler of the Mishna. The Malbim theorizes that the Haggadah was written by Rav Yehudah haNasi himself.

Nevertheless all commentators agree that it was completed by the time of Rav Nachman (mentioned in Pesachim 116a). There is a dispute however which Rav Nachman the Talmud was referring to. According to some commentators this was Rav Nachman bar Yaakov (around 280 CE) while others maintain this was Rav Nachman bar Yitzchak (360 CE).

The Haggadah in the past 1000 years

As of 2006, the oldest complete readable manuscript of the Haggadah found today is in a prayer book compiled by Saadia Gaon in the tenth century. It is not until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, however, that Haggadot were being produced as works in their own right. It is believed that the first printed Haggadot were produced in 1482, in Guadalajara, Spain; however this is mostly conjecture, as there is no printer's colophon. The oldest confirmed printed Haggadah was printed in Soncino, Italy in 1486 by the Soncino Press.

Although the Jewish printing community was quick to adopt the printing press as a means of producing texts, the general adoption rate of printed Haggadot was slow. By the end of the sixteenth century, only twenty-five Haggadah editions had been printed. This number increased to thirty-seven during the seventeenth century, and 234 during the eighteenth century. It is not until the nineteenth century, when 1,269 separate editions were produced, that a significant shift is seen toward printed Haggadot as opposed to manuscripts. From 1900–1960 alone, over 1,100 Haggadot were printed.

This relatively slow adoption of course has its roots in many places, but it has been attributed in part to the relatively impersonal nature of printed text, compared with manuscripts.

Published in 1526, the Prague Haggadah is known for its attention to detail in lettering and introducing many of the themes still found in modern texts. Although illustrations had often been a part of the Haggadah, it was not until the Prague Haggadah that they were used extensively in a printed text. The Haggadah features over sixty woodcut illustrations picturing "scenes and symbols of the Passover ritual; [...] biblical and rabbinic elements that actually appear in the Haggadah text; and scenes and figures from biblical or other sources that play no role in the Haggadah itself, but have either past or future redemptive associations".

While the main portions of the text of the Haggadah have remained mostly the same since their original compilation, there have been some additions after the last part of the text. Some of these additions, such as the cumulative songs "One Kid" ("חד גדיא") and "Who Knows One?" ("אחד מי יודע"), which were added sometime in the fifteenth century, gained such acceptance that they became a standard to print at the back of the Haggadah. In more recent times, attempts to modernize the Haggadah have been undertaken primarily to revitalize a text seen by some as "no longer expressing their deepest religious feelings nor their understanding of the Passover festival itself".