[HAGGADAH.] Offenbacher Haggadah.

Inscribed from One Jewish Fraternity to Another

[HAGGADAH.] Offenbacher Haggadah. Offenbach am Main: Verlag des Herausgebers Doktor Guggenheim.

4to. Publisher’s brown wrappers lettered in black; pp. 97, [1 (colophon)]; text German and Hebrew, printed in red and black, hand-coloured full-page woodcut illustrations, tailpieces, and borders by Fritz Kredel; small tears to spine with short split to upper joint, edges slightly creased and worn, spine lightly sunned; very light marginal dust-soiling to fore-edges of a few pp., small marginal paperflaws to foot of pp. 67–70; otherwise a very good copy; contemporary ink stamp ‘Verbindung im K.C. “Licaria” München’ to front flyleaves, with contemporary black ink inscription ‘Unseren lb. Kartellverbindung “Licaria” zur freundl. Erinnerung. Die Verbindung in K[artell]-C[onvent] “Viadrina”’, signed Paul Jacobi.

First edition, no. 86 of 300 copies, of the Offenbacher Haggadah, lavishly illustrated by Fritz Kredel in the ‘Wiener Werkstätte’ style and commissioned by German-Jewish lawyer and art collector Siegfried Guggenheim, this copy presented by the Jewish fraternity at the University of Breslau (Wrocław) to that of Munich.

The striking German typeface is Jessen by Rudolf Koch, who was instrumental in developing several modern blackletter typefaces, and the Hebrew type was designed by highly influential Jewish typographer Berthold Wolpe, known for his Albertus typeface, used extensively by Faber from the 1940s onward. Guggenheim, in his introduction, explains that the work was printed for a ‘small circle of relatives and friends’, with some of the old Hebrew songs printed in German letters so that even those unfamiliar with Hebrew can sing along’ (p. 6, trans.), incorporating scholarly contributions from the likes of Leo Baeck and Caesar Seligmann.

On 21 April 1928, Stefan Zweig wrote to Siegfried Guggenheim praising the work, calling it ‘a special work of art with which you have creatively transplanted a piece of Jewish tradition into German soil. It should be honoured in every German book arts exhibition, and I believe that an English-language edition would have immense success in America […] I am certainly only one of very many to thank you for this extraordinary gift’ (quoted in Zweig, Lettere sull’ebraismo (2023), trans.). However, there was never to be an English edition. Guggenheim lost his permission to work as a notary, and then as a lawyer; in 1938 he was deported to Buchenwald and subsequently fled to New York, becoming an American citizen in 1943.

Provenance: inscribed by Paul Jacobi ‘to our dear fellow fraternity members, as a friendly memento’ (trans.) on behalf of the Jewish Studentenverbindung (fraternity) ‘Viadrina’ at the University of Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), founded in 1886 to counter the antisemitism of the university’s non-Jewish student associations. This copy was presented to the Jewish student fraternity Licaria, active in Munich from 1895 until 1933, when all Jewish associations were forcibly dissolved by the Nazis. Both Licaria and Viadrina belonged to the Kartell-Convent (KC), an umbrella organisation of German-Jewish student associations.

The flyleaves of this copy bear Licaria’s distinctive ‘Zirkel’ monogram, which ‘contains the first letters of the society’s name, a combination of the letters V-C-F or E-F-V, and an exclamation point at the end’ (Leo Baeck Institute, online).

SKU: 2124994