This is a page from a Haggadah printed in the famous printing press of Sulzbach in 1755.
On this page, the text which concludes the Seder, “Chasal Siddur Pesach,” is featured on the top right of the page, surrounded by the commentary of the famous Spanish sage Don Isaac Abarbanel. Underneath the text is an illustration of the Temple. It seems that the artist had never actually visited Jerusalem as the architectural style of his drawing is clearly European. These drawings originally appeared in another famous Haggadah printed in Amsterdam in 1695. The woodcuts of the Sulzbach Haggadah are imitations of the copperplate illustrations of the Amsterdam Haggadah and bear the same captions.
This Haggadah differs from most later Haggadot because the phrase “Next Year in Jerusalem” does not conclude the Seder but rather appears on the previous page. One explanation for why this later became the concluding phrase of the Seder is that as the exile from Israel and Jerusalem became more and more prolonged and the longing for the land intensified, it seemed appropriate to end the Seder with these words. It is puzzling, however, that the editor decided to include a picture of the Temple on this page rather than on the previous page. Perhaps the editor of the Haggadah put the picture on the final page to highlight the importance of Jerusalem; a precursor of the later move to end the Haggadah with the words “Next Year in Jerusalem.”
The Haggadah reproduced here was printed in 1755 by Meshullam Zalman. It features Judeo-German versions of the songs “Adir Hu” “Ehad Mi Yode’a” and “Had Gadya.”
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Sulzbach - Sulzbach, a town in southern Germany, never had a large Jewish community but was widely known in the Jewish world for the many Hebrew and Judeo-German books which were printed there. The first Jewish-owned print shop in the town was opened in 1669 by Isaak Kohen of Prague.
