Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

March 31, 2026

A Rare Judeo-Persian Haggadah

With a poem of praise to the Montefiores.

Paradoxically, and for reasons Bernard Lewis explained quite well, the Israeli and Iranian people are largely united in their desire to see the demise of the Islamic Republic. Perhaps that makes it particularly apt that the National Library of Israel has recently become aware of a Persian Haggadah in its collections, published sometime in the 1880s and containing an original poem in the local Jewish vernacular. JNS reports that

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