Kidnappings usually don't play out over 450 years. But that's exactly what happened in the case of one particular book, according to David Stern, director of Penn's Jewish Studies program.
About 45 curious bibliophiles turned out yesterday to hear about a mid-15th century Haggadah, or Jewish Passover text, the first topic of the Penn Humanities Forum's History of the Book lecture series.
The historic book, recently re-discovered by Stern, along with a colleague at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, is in the early stages of being fully translated and studied, but has already yielded some fascinating finds, which Stern spoke about.
Most likely commissioned by a wealthy Jew somewhere in southern Germany around 1450, according to Stern, the book changed hands several times before finally reaching an abbot associated with the famed library at Tegernsee, north of Munich.
And that's where the story really gets interesting.
"There are actually about 15 illustrated Haggadahs of this type from South Germany alone around 1450," Stern said -- but an addition makes this one stand out.
In an attempt to discover more about the text, the abbot turned the Haggadah over to a Dominican monk with an apparent flair for anti-Semitic vitriol, according to Stern.
The monk, Erhard von Pappenheim, fluent in the Hebrew that the Haggadah was written in, wrote a treatise on the work that was eventually added as a prologue to the book.
Chock full of what Stern called "nonsensical" anti-Semitic sentiments, Erhard's treatise mixes and matches "truth and fantasy" of the Jewish Passover seder, Stern said.
And although Stern admitted that the monk demonstrated some in-depth knowledge of the seder, Erhard also included passages detailing the ways in which the Jews prepared "six matzahs before the rest in a very special way with the blood of Christian infants."
"The book was kidnapped, appropriated by the abbot and Erhard to serve as evidence against the Jews," he said.
Labeled "a work in progress" by Stern's team of historians, the ultimate goal of the group is to publish an annotated translation of the Haggadah.
And in case the story of this text has sparked an interest to purchase a Haggadah for your personal collection, don't call home for the money just yet. Books similar to this one will set you back "more than a medium-priced home on the Main Line," according to Stern.
The weekly lecture series, which will continue throughout the semester, aims to "get people involved in the production of text in the broadest sense, including film, cartoons, even children's books," Penn Humanities Forum Co-Director Peter Stallybrass said.
