Synagogal Representation in the First Darmstadt Haggadah and the Fate of Heidelberg's Jews

The First Darmstadt Haggadah (Darmstadt, Hessisches Landes- und Hochschulbibliothek, Codex orientalis 8) was written and illuminated in southern Germany around 1430 by Israel ben Meir of Heidelberg, probably with the assistance of his son, Meir Jaffe. The embellishment of the manuscript is unusually lavish and its iconography is highly anomalous in the context of medieval Ashkenazi haggadah illumination. The full-page miniatures on ff. 37v and 48v have two principal foci--architecture and learning. Here, elaborate, multi-story structures are inhabited by numerous men and women reading and discussing books. Composed of an eclectic mixture of Gothic and classicizing architectural elements, these buildings are clearly not intended to present the illusion of a domestic interior, the location for the Passover seder at which the haggadah was used and the table for which is represented in the lowest register of f. 37v. The building might best be understood as a particularly magnificent and highly aspirational synagogue where Jewish learning is celebrated. Additionally, several pictorial motifs on both folios were adopted from Christian sources and reinterpreted to visualize the superiority of Judaism. I argue that the miniatures on ff. 37v and 48v, which accompany texts that explicitly curse the Jews’ Gentile persecutors, were designed by Israel ben Meir in response to the expulsion from Heidelberg of the entire Jewish community in 1390, the consecration of the synagogue as a chapel dedicated to the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Mary, and St. Stephen Protomartyr, and the acquisition by Heidelberg University of Jewish buildings, furnishings, and books.