Thursday, March 24, 2011

A savage, hilarious review of a Haggadah from 1890.

Here's a thoroughly amusing (and savage) review of a Hebrew-English Haggadah published in Vienna in 1886. The reviewer is Israel Zangwill in his appropriately named Morour and Charouseth column for the Jewish Standard. Zangwill writes that every year he seems to "get hold of an edition which is funnier than the preceding year's." The trouble with this one is that the English is simply awful and Germanic, abounding with spelling mistakes and bizarre comments. In addition to the ones cited by Zangwill, I came across its mention of "horseradisch" and the "sederdish," "Grace after meat," and the remark that "we are leaning back" when one drinks the cups of wine. Zangwill also takes issue with the illustrations, which he thinks are atrocious.


Here is the page with the Four Sons, which Zangwill notes "grow small by degrees," for no apparent reason, so it is that the the fourth son who "hath no capacity to inquire" is "represented as a dwarf." Zangwill claims that the body language of this son resembles that of a "vociferous Maggid."


He also mocked the 13 illustrations depicting all the 15 stages of the Seder, and its men with "steeple-crowned hats" and "ladies [in] sheitels." For some reason there are different numbers of people in the illustrations. Zangwill says that he's not sure if this means they were under the table:


The edition I saw was the second "thoroughly revised" edition, where some of the things he pointed out were corrected (Vienna, 1896).

Here is Israel Zangwill, by the way. Doesn't look like the sort of man who finds anything funny, so it just goes to show that you can never tell by pictures:


14 comments:

  1. My family still uses some old Vienna Schlesinger haggados, though not quite this old. Note that the Hebrew in the 1885 edition is not perfect, either: "Mah ha-edus" instead of "mah ha-edos."
    The Four Sons illustration bears a close resemblence to an old brocaded Seder centerpiece in my family's possession.

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  2. Interesting how many mistakes or typos there are in the review.

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  3. I have several sedarim with those illustrations. They never fail to provoke some eye-rolling.

    What Lipman said. The one I noticed was "tam" with a mem that wasn't sofit. It's not worth pointing out in itself, but it's evocative in the context of a comedy routine about typos.

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  4. And re your title, Fred, savage and hilarious often go together. I don't believe that humor is inherently cruel, but it does seem that savagery makes hilariosity easier. Decades ago, before he bacame famous outside of Chicago (my sweet home), Roger Ebert did a review of *Andy Warhol's Frankenstein* that I still remember. (I didn't see the movie.) RE talked about how violent it was, and ended the review by saying you should see it if you didn't vomit when you saw *The Exorcist*; if that fails, put your fingers down your throat. And some now-forgotten reviewer once quoted Tom Cruise in *The Firm*, saying that mail fraud isn't sexy [as a criminal charge], but it has teeth, and saying this applies to Cruise as well. (I did see *The Firm*--I'm a David Strathairn fan.) And the now-forgotten reviewer of *Rocky IV* (didn't see it) who said the title was well chosen because by the time the movie's over all the characters need an IV.

    Point is, it's easy to be hilarious when your being savage.

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  5. Nice. My wife is a descendant of the Zangwill family -- will have to send this to her...

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  6. The Four Sons illustration is from an engraving in a 1695 Amsterdam Haggadah, and the 15 stages of the Seder illustration is from a 1629 Venice Hagaddah. See Y. H. Yerushalmi, Haggadah and History (JPS, 1975), plates 60 and 54. The illustrations in the Amsterdam Haggadah were "the work of a proselyte who had come to Amsterdam from Germany and who, upon his conversion, adopted the name Abraham ben Jacob," and they were "borrowed from a Christian source: the biblical engravings published by the Swiss artist Matthaeus Merian in 1625-30." In Merian's work, the Haggadah's Wise Son figure was Hannibal swearing eternal enmity to Rome, the Wicked Son a soldier from one of Marian's battle scenes, the Simple Son from Marian's illustration of Saul being anointed by Samuel, and the Son Who Knows Not to Ask a figure from the Hannibal engraving. See, Yerushalmi, comment to plate 60.

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  7. I love my Sclesinger machzorim, which I guess were my great-grandfather's (1893). I use them on yomim noraim, they are inspirational. The title page says it comes with an "Egnlish" translation, and it certainly is the best Egnlish I have ever read, from "it is usually to eat an apple dipped on honey" to the final blowing of the cornets. I often wonder who it was produced for, because the instructions are so randomly translated one wonders how an Engnlish speaker could actually navigate around the service, even if he wanted to comprehend the pitiful that are left in Hebrew lest they give a curled appearance.

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  8. I'm descended from the Schlesinger publishers of Hebrew books.

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  9. Are you descended or are you being descended?

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  10. 10024, thanks for that info!

    Chaviva, glad you enjoyed it.

    Steve, great comment.

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  11. Being descended? Huh?

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  12. Are you descended or are you being descended?

    What are you being meaning?

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  13. I'm confused.

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