The Bene Israel formed one of India’s oldest Jewish communities, historically concentrated along the Konkan coast before increasingly settling during the nineteenth century in Bombay and Poona. Marathi was their everyday language, and the emergence of Hebrew-Marathi printing reflects both their integration within Maharashtrian society and a period of renewed engagement with Jewish textual learning. The Library of Congress specifically highlights this 1874 Haggadah as an example of Hebrew-Marathi Jewish culture and notes that its illustrations depict Indian Jews celebrating Passover.

The Poona Haggadah followed an earlier Hebrew-Marathi Haggadah printed in Bombay in 1846, but its illustrations represent a significant development. As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi observed, whereas the Bombay illustrations remained closely dependent upon Amsterdam prototypes, those of the Poona edition had become “palpably Indian in tone and detail.” Particularly important is the newly introduced scene of matzah preparation, showing Bene Israel men and women separately engaged in the work, dressed in local clothing and seated in characteristically Indian positions. The Israel Museum has singled out this image for its documentation of Indian Jewish life.

This localization makes the volume considerably more than a vernacular translation. The Haggadah is the Jewish book most closely associated with domestic ritual and the transmission of collective memory from one generation to another. Here the Hebrew liturgy remains central, but Marathi translation, local customs and Indian imagery allow the ancient narrative of Exodus to be transmitted within the linguistic and cultural environment of nineteenth-century Maharashtra. The volume is consequently an unusually tangible record of how a diaspora Jewish community could remain recognizably Indian and recognizably Jewish at the same time.

This was the copy of David Solomon Sassoon (1880–1942), whose signature, “D. S. Sassoon,” appears inside the front board. Sassoon assembled one of the greatest private collections of Hebrew manuscripts and printed books of the twentieth century and had particularly deep connections to the Jewish communities of India. The volume subsequently entered the Valmadonna Trust Library, perhaps the most celebrated private collection of Hebrew printed books formed in the later twentieth century.

Provenance: David Solomon Sassoon (1880–1942), signed by him inside the front board; Sassoon Collection; Valmadonna Trust Library.

Yaari 1077; Yudlov, Otzar HaHaggadot, 1437; A. Yaari, Ha-Defus ha-Ivri be-Arzot ha-Mizrah, II, “Ha-Defus ha-Ivri be-Poona,” pp. 83–84; Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Haggadah and History, nos. 107–110; The Jews of India, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1995, p. 25.