What’s a Virgin Mary-like Figure Doing in a Famous Medieval Haggadah?

She sits on the donkey as a queen might sit on a throne. Yet she wears no crown, and with her shawl pulled up over her head she seems modest and unprepossessing. Her progeny, one slightly older than the other, lie swaddled in her arms, and as she looks down, her brow is slightly knit, and her tiny rosebud mouth forms a tiny but distinct pout.

In a work of Christian art, this solemn, modest woman could not but remind a viewer of the Virgin Mary. In fact, the whole scene in which she appears—seated on her donkey, offspring in her arms, led by her husband—recalls the famous depiction of an episode usually called “The Holy Family’s Flight into Egypt.” In that episode, recounted in the second chapter of the New Testament book of Matthew, King Herod, having learned from astrologers that a child is to be born who will be the promised messiah of the Jews, is determined to hunt down and destroy him, thereby prompting Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus to flee Bethlehem for Egypt.

This story has been a popular theme in Christian art from the earliest times, rendered often in stained glass, sculpture, or manuscript illumination. So what is the scene doing here, in a Jewish book—a Haggadah—containing the home service for the eve of Passover? And what is it doing in this particular Haggadah, perhaps the medieval example, par excellence, of the form: the magnificent Golden Haggadah, written and illustrated (probably) in Barcelona around 1320?