one of the things that i find so exciting about the early jewish community in amsterdam
particularly in the 16th 17th and 18th centuries is the fact that it was a place that drew in
people from very diverse backgrounds surprisingly diverse backgrounds and they came together to
produce some tremendous artifacts of jewish culture that later went on to have very
illustrious careers one of those documents is the amsterdam haggadah of 1695 and in particular the
copper engravings that really set the signal for many many more haggadahs for centuries right up
to and including the maxwell house haggadah that was very popular here in america now we all love
reading haggadahs with great illustrations and the person that we have to thank for the
amsterdam haggada is an unusual individual named abraham bar yakov whose years were 1669 to 1730.
he was born in germany probably in the rhineland and what little we know about his background is
that he was actually a convert to judaism he was originally a christian pastor a protestant pastor
and he moved to amsterdam at the age of 26 and that's where he converted and began to you know
use his talents as an engraver and presumably as a pastor because he had great familiarity
with the illustrated bibles in circulation at the time and he brought those talents together
in the amsterdam haggadah we know just a handful of facts about him he was apparently married twice
we don't know about his first wife perhaps that was when he was still christian his second wife
however was deborah proops a very famous family of printers her husband was actually employed by her
brother solomon ben joseph proops who published the 1712 reprint of the 1695 haggadah that abraham
bar jacob is associated with and it was avraham bar aramaic rather than ben yaakov and normally
with a convert you add yaakov bar abraham but there's no question about it because you refer to
himself elsewhere as me mishpachat abraham avino meaning from the family of abraham our father
but anyway let's have a look at this amazing i've got it just for a few minutes so here's the title
page of it absolutely gorgeous and you see there's representation of moses on the right the law giver
and aaron the high priest on the left extremely influential design that was repeated again
over and over again and copper engraving watches a technological uh upgrade from previous forms of
illustrations here you can see gorgeous rendition of uh the daughter of pharaoh receiving or finding
baby moses in the nile you can see in right in the center of the river in the mid ground there
is moses in the basket and then instead of compressed timeline in the back you can see it
looks like the the maidservant not the daughter of pharaoh herself as we might have in the midrashic
tradition reaches out to receive moses and then on the left side of the foreground you see apparently
the servant presenting the baby moses to um the the daughter of pharaoh herself who was
so designated by a crown fascinating kind of very detailed and gorgeous illustration you can imagine
people sitting around the seder table in amsterdam enjoying this and then really all over europe
if the previous image might have appealed to the young daughters in the family perhaps
with maternal instincts this one is definitely designed for the young boys in the family with uh
this dramatic image of moses beating the egyptian who presented a danger as described in the book of
exodus and you can see all around our various you know activities involved with building
pitom and ramses the cities described as the the slave cities that the jews were involved
with in the book of exodus so really gorgeous detailed illustrations very evocative and so
on it's also famous for being the site of a very early hebrew map you can see it's
laid out east to west here here's a colorized version of it also very interesting looking
but i think what is most fascinating about this is in this type of era the whole idea of plagiarism
was like not very well defined and so here is a classic image from the haggadah that shows the
pictures of the four sons right you've got on the right the wise son and then second from the
right is the wicked son the third from the right is the simple son and then at the very left is
the one who does not know how to ask and you'd see they're actually you know different in size
as well but when you look a little bit more deeply you see that actually these four suns
were clearly taken from early models and in fact many of the images in the amsterdam
haggadah were simply taken from earlier biblical illustrations that came from christian sources
which is perhaps something that our artist might have become familiar with through his earlier
christian study here for example you see the four sons uh in the abstinence in the top left
image and by the way ironically it says underneath here in the german
you know reproduction is forbidden which it's ironic because of course this is exactly what
he was doing but this is also from 1931 it's a reprint from then so it's already well in the
public domain at any rate three of the four sons are simply flipped in mirror image and taken from
entirely different illustrations drawn from the conus biblical of matteo marion of basel a mid
17th century print of the bible with illustrations so you can see for example the hakam the son is
actually from a picture of hannibal who's offering a sacrifice in the top right
the rasha the wicked son is actually a roman soldier in the bottom right fleeing a battle and
then on the left the the simple son is ironically based on a model of the prophet samuel in the
lower left and then he's just flipped as well and a hat is added to kind of enforce the image so the
whole idea of what could be borrowed what could be built upon what could be augmented was really
very fluid in the 17th century i'll just wrap it up with one quick look at his own signature
which is really beautiful anyways you can see that right there in the bottom of this image it
says abraham bar yakov and i find it interesting that he chose to specifically illustrate his name
underneath a depiction of the story from the book of jonah the book of yona in which the the stormy
sea throws jonah overboard he's swallowed up by some kind of aquatic creature and then spit
out safely on dry land and i just wonder it's very tempting to think is this what abraham bar
yakov thought of himself that he too came from a very tumultuous era he landed in amsterdam and
he found his wife he found a family he found his mission as a copper engraver and finally as a jew
fascinating don't you think i hope you enjoyed this video and i hope we'll have a chance to
explore amsterdam together this fall with kosher river cruises thanks very much for watching