Passover is one of the most important festivals of the Jews, which celebrates their escape from Egypt. The festival is marked with lavish meals and special prayers on the first and second night, known as Seder meal. On Passover, the meal, comprising of various traditional dishes, is prepared at every Jewish household. Every year, based on the directions of Haggadah, Seder meal is organized and enjoyed by family and friends together. Passover Haggadah is the text in which instruction for the Seder meal are given.
Haggadah, which literally means "telling," is a fulfillment of the scriptural commandment to each Jew to tell his son about the history of the Jewish liberation from slavery in Egypt, as described in the book of Exodus in the Torah. The text has a unique blend of brevity with tradition. There is controversy regarding the exact period of the compilation of the Haggadah. According to Jewish tradition, the Haggadah was compiled during the Mishnaic and Talmudic periods, although the exact date is unknown.
In the year 1486, the oldest confirmed printed Haggadah was printed in Soncino, Italy by the Soncino family. Even though the Jewish printing community immediately adopted the printing press as a means of producing texts, the general adoption rate of printed Haggadah was slow. Only twenty-five Haggadah editions had been printed by the end of the sixteenth century. Gradually with the passing time, this number increased, to 37 during the 17th century and 234 during the 18th century.
It was not until the nineteenth century, when 1,269 separate editions were produced, that an important change was seen toward printed Haggadah, as opposed to manuscripts. In the period lasting from 1900 to 1960 alone, over 1,100 Haggadahs were printed. According to some sources, the oldest complete, readable manuscript of the Haggadah was found, in the year 2006, in a prayer book compiled by Saadia Gaon in the tenth century.
The book of Haggadah features over sixty woodcut illustrations, picturing "scenes and symbols of the Passover custom; biblical and rabbinic fundamentals that actually appear in the Haggadah text; and scenes and figures from biblical or other sources that play no role in the Haggadah itself, but have either past or future redemptive associations". While the main portions of Haggadah text have remained mostly the same, since their original compilation, certain additions have been made in the past years, such as the cumulative songs.
