October 12, 2021
Solving the Mystery of the Brick and the Book
By Marc Michael EpsteinA professor of Jewish art finds himself turning from one explanation of a puzzling drawing found in an old manuscript to another—and then possibly back again.
Turn it over, and [again] turn it over, for all is therein.
And look into it; And become gray and old therein;
And do not move away from it,
for you have no better portion than it.
—Mishnah Avot 5:22
Shortly after the publication of my 2015 book The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative & Religious Imagination, I received a charmingly laudatory bit of fan mail. “Dear Professor Epstein,” it read, “After nearly a century of research on the manuscript, you have definitively solved the mystery of the so-called ‘Birds’ Head Haggadah.’”
I had two reactions: first, I was delighted by the writer’s use of “so-called” to qualify the phrase “Birds’ Head Haggadah.” This is the designation used by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem for MS 150/7, a manuscript made in the southern Rhine Valley around 1300, containing the earliest surviving illustrated home liturgy for the seder, the ritual meal on the eve of Passover. By dint of the fact that the putative bird-headed figures shown in MS 150/7 are actually griffin-headed human hybrids, in my own publications, I have renamed the manuscript “The Griffins’ Head” Haggadah. So, I was pleased to find that my interlocutor concurred.