Until WW II, only one copy of the Haggadah printed by David Abenatar Melo was known. It was kept in the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana, the Jewish Cultural History Collection at the Allard Pierson. The book was lost during the war when the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana was looted by the Nazis and taken to Germany. When the collection returned to Amsterdam in 1946, the prayer book was reported missing.
The discovery of this second copy of Melo’s Haggadah, containing unique textual features that were not to be found in the first copy, is of major importance. The Spanish-language prayer book for instance includes a rare Portuguese bedtime prayer bound before the title page. The prayer appears to be the only one of its kind and may have been an original composition by David Abenatar Melo himself. It is a striking feature, the more so because printed Sephardi prayers are very rare before the 20th century.
The purchase of the Haggadah marks more than four centuries of involvement in the city of Amsterdam by the Portuguese-Israelite community as well as its meaningful contribution to Jewish printing in the 17th and 18th centuries. On 7 September last, the Portuguese-Israelite community in Amsterdam celebrated the 350th anniversary of the monumental Portuguese synagogue.
David Abenatar Melo
The printer David Abenatar Melo (1569-1632) was a Portuguese converso, someone who had been forced to convert to Catholicism. He fled the Inquisition and moved to Amsterdam, where he returned to Judaism. In 1616 he founded a printing house to cater for the liturgical needs of Amsterdam’s flourishing Sephardi community.
Curator Rachel Boertjens: “The acquisition of this prayer book is an exceptional opportunity for the Allard Pierson to strengthen the world-renowned collection of 17th-century Amsterdam Jewish printed books and manuscripts. This unique liturgical material contributes to the research that we encourage into the development of the Sephardi Jewish community in the early modern period of Jewish Amsterdam.”
Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana
The Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana is the Allard Pierson’s Jewish Cultural History Collection. It is among the foremost heritage collections in the field of Jewish cultural history of continental Europe. The library holds a world-famous collection of Jewish printed books and manuscripts from Amsterdam, including a unique and distinctive collection of Haggadot from the 17th and 18th centuries. The Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana was included in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2023.
The purchase was made possible by the generosity of the Stichting Levi Lassen, the Rosenthal Fonds and the Steenbergen Fonds/Amsterdams Universiteitsfonds, and the Vrienden van het Allard Pierson .