Entanglements: Bodies and Texts in the Sassoon Haggadah

The folios of the Sassoon Haggadah abound with life. Together, its creatures facilitate discovery of the Passover Seder’s rituals and its texts. They highlight key passages and deepen the text’s interpretive possibilities. Although many of these beings appear outside the text – in the margins, at the edge of the folio – they are central to its performance and to its meaning. This article traces the contours of the manuscript’s corporealities from its coarse animal skins with prominent hair follicles to the various creatures inscribed on its flesh. Throughout the manuscript, bodies and boundaries are blurred. Creatures become familiar, even divine-like, while humans become abject, monstrous. Bodies are assembled, exposed, threatened, and penetrated. Their identities are unstable, twisting and turning back on themselves to expose their opposition, their closeness, their simultaneity, and their inseparability. I explore the combinatory space of the manuscript, and particularly its imbrications of body and world, self and other, limit and possibility.