Newswise — In the late fifteenth-century, Jewish-Christian relations were fraught with distrust, violence, and accusations of blood libels and host scandals made by Christians against Jews. The most infamous of these accusations was made in 1475, when four Jews were burned at the stake in Trent, Italy, for allegedly murdering a young child, Simon, in order to use his blood for the Passover Seder.

In this climate, in 1489, a magnificent, illustrated, Passover Haggadah, the ritual text used at the Passover Seder was sent as a bequest from a recently deceased Christian pastor in Passau to the Monastery of Saint Quirinus at Tegernsee in southern Germany. His is the only such Haggadah known to have been gifted to a monastery, presumably for study by its monks. Once it arrived there, the monastery’s abbot and librarian sent the Haggadah to a very learned Dominican friar and asked him to write a treatise explaining the meaning of the Seder. That treatise, now bound into the codex with the Haggadah, is one of the most unusual documents ever produced in the later Middle Age. A remarkable testimony to Christian understanding of Jewish practice at the time, it combines both accurate knowledge and libelous beliefs, including a recipe for mixing Christian blood into matzah.

Three scholars from the United States, Israel, and Germany, experts in medieval Judaism, Christianity, and art, have now unraveled the fascinating story of this codex and revealed the unusual light it sheds on Jewish-¬Christian relations of the period. David M. Stern (Moritz and Josephine Berg Professor of Classical Hebrew Literature at the University of Pennsylvania), has reconstructed the history of the codex, and Christoph Markschies (former president of Humboldt University in Berlin and chair of ancient Christianity) has explicated its significance for late medieval Christianity. Most remarkably of all, Sarit Shalev-Eyni (senior lecturer in art history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), through a thorough scholarly analysis, have discovered that the Passover Haggadah’s own illustrations, though largely typical of Jewish iconographic conventions, also contain a few highly unusual ‘Christianized’ details that appear in no other known Haggadah.

Currently held in the Bavarian State Library in Munich, this absolutely unique document stands to change many long-held conceptions about Jewish-Christian relations in the late Middle Ages and early modernity. The Monk’s Haggadah, published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, brings together a full-color facsimile edition of this codex, along with a translation, historical analysis, and detailed descriptions. A corresponding German-language edition is planned for release in 2016.