Haggadah

The Haggadah is a Jewish text that sets forth the order of the Passover Seder, guiding participants through the ceremonial retelling of the Exodus from Egypt and fulfilling the obligation to recount that story to one's children on the first night of Passover. It is not a single authored work but a layered composite of blessings, biblical passages, rabbinic interpretation, songs and poetic additions accumulated over centuries, believed to have taken standardized form during the Mishnaic and Talmudic periods, with its earliest complete surviving manuscript dating to the tenth century. As a genre it later became a major vehicle for Jewish book illumination, with richly illustrated versions produced from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries onward, and the first independent printed editions appearing in Spain and Italy around 1482 to 1486.