People of the Book

[Rachel-K]

Almost all of our characters are "people of the book" in one way or another. There are the generations of Jews throughout history, to whom the term traditionally refers, but Hannah, Ozren, and so many others whose lives literally "touch the pages" of this Haggadah are linked in a long narrative here. What do you make of our "bookish" characters? (I quickly admit to jumping right into any novel that builds romance, adventure, and mystery around bookbinders and librarians!)

[Clare]

I love to read. Books are so precious to me. I can imagine the feelings about a Jewish religious book that was copied by hand and so beautifully illustrated-the feelings that would prompt a catholic priest that was charged with wiping out heresy to "protect" the book and the same feeling that would cause a Muslin to risk his life to protect the book. I would love to personally see this manuscript. We have a manuscript museum in Charleston that changes its displays each month. I have seen both an exhibit of early Christian texts and also an exhibits concerning women who exercised power over the centuries. Clare

[Peppermill]

---

Clare wrote:
I love to read. Books are so precious to me. I can imagine the feelings about a Jewish religious book that was copied by hand and so beautifully illustrated-the feelings that would prompt a catholic priest that was charged with wiping out heresy to "protect" the book and the same feeling that would cause a Muslin to risk his life to protect the book. I would love to personally see this manuscript. We have a manuscript museum in Charleston that changes its displays each month. I have seen both an exhibit of early Christian texts and also an exhibits concerning women who exercised power over the centuries. Clare

---

Clare -- if you ever get to NYC, as much as you like books, I hope you find time to visit the Cloisters. It is hard, because you only get to see a single pair of pages for most displays of medieval manuscripts, but I find it still a thrill to see the original work.

http://www.metmuseum.org/Works_Of_Art/the_cloisters

I believe that a couple of the specialized libraries (John Pierpoint Morgan, for example?) also have fine displays of manuscripts, but I have not visited those. Also, the British Libraries have some excellent on-line access to precious documents -- the Internet access approaches being able to browse the books themselves.

http://www.themorgan.org/collections/collections.asp?id=125

http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/ttpbooks.html

[eddrmae]

I have heard the expression 'people of the book' used by Muslims today to cover both Jews and Christians (believers of the one true God.)  It is interesting that the book is set during the Inquisition but what I took away from this read more than anything was the way that the stories of the individual characters through the book's history gave the book a life of it's own: the wine/blood, the salt crystals, the hair. Hannah's act of adding the Australian fig seed, serves to continue the life of the book into the future each character in his/her turn adding their contribution to the book's story.