In a Tortoiseshell
The following excerpt is from my term paper for ART 431: Art, Culture, and Identity in Medieval Spain. Students were able to explore an object of their choice from medieval Iberian visual culture, framing their argument within the relevant course themes of culture, religion, and medieval notions of race in the Iberian Peninsula. Through visual and historical analysis, comparison, and critical engagement with current scholarship, my classmates and I contributed to a lively discourse about the nuanced ways in which social and cultural groups co-existed in medieval Iberia.
Excerpt
In the extravagantly illustrated Rylands Haggadah, a dark blue-skinned, wide-stanced figure barges forward, wielding a curved saber above his head and tucking a bright red shield close to his torso (Fig. 1). He is the mischievous “Wicked Child,” serving as a symbolic example of how Passover seder participants should not engage with the commandment to remember the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. Though the figure has traditionally been interpreted as portraying the threat posed by rejecting Jewish tradition, I argue that he serves a dual role in the work as a soldier and enslaved individual, representing both biblical and medieval slavery, and reflecting how medieval notions of foreignness influenced the haggadah’s pedagogical program.
Contrasts between the Wicked Son and intellectual figures in the haggadah highlight the Wicked Son’s connection to storytelling and interpretation in relation to enslavement. The Wicked Son and Wise Son’s differing relationships to the physical text suggests their attitudes towards learning, characterizing the Wicked Son as enslaved by his resistance to tradition. The Wicked Son storms rightwards with his sword pointed towards the text itself. In particular, the tip of the sword occupies a gap in the page’s paragraph structure where the paragraph about the Wise Son ends. Therefore, the Wicked Son specifically targets the Wise Son’s text, which advocates for traditional Passover rituals. In contrast, the Wise Son interacts more closely and tenderly with the text of the page. While the Wicked Son attacks the actual text participants use during the Seder, the Wise Child holds a miniature version of the haggadah which reads, in very small print, “What does the Wise Child Say? What are the testimonies, the statutes and laws…” He engages in the very same act as the Seder participants in a self-referential show of authority. Specifically, he points to the word “והחוקים” meaning “the statutes,” referencing his prioritization of Torah commandment and laws. By engaging with the text at hand in a similar manner to the real Seder-goers instead of seeking to “destroy” it, the Wise Son demonstrates the behavior of a free individual while the Wicked Son is akin to a defiant Israelite who does not accept God’s word, one who is not yet free from Egyptian rule and has not received the Torah at Mount Sinai.12
While his relationship to textual interpretation highlights the theme of biblical enslavement, the figure’s potential Muslim identity relates strongly to medieval Iberian slavery practices, in which most unfree individuals were Muslim. Julie Harris understands the “othering” of the Wicked Son to rest mainly in a Muslim or North African identity, shown by the style of his armor and stereotyped physiological features including an upturned nose and sharp teeth, laying important groundwork for understanding slavery’s connection to the figure on a social-religious dimension.3 Harris posits that a Muslim warrior serves as a response to Jewish assimilation in Christian society, as the Wicked Child was once illustrated as a Christian soldier in medieval haggadot, a depiction ceasing to bestow negative character onto the Wicked Son as Jews began to bear arms like their Christian counterparts.4 Therefore, using a Muslim figure would allow Seder participants to more clearly portray the antagonistic Wicked Son through the use of a widely-used set of stereotyping imagery in Iberian material culture meant to imbue figures with an intimidating or strange foreignness.
However, the use of a Muslim figure would also likely have led Jewish viewers to associate the Wicked Son with enslaved individuals in their immediate environment, combining notions of biblical slavery implicit in the figure with a medieval perspective on slavery.5 Jewish families of means in medieval Iberia, while also under Christian rule, could and did own slaves. As such, their understanding of slavery at the time likely combined with traditional interpretations of the Wicked Son. Jane Barlow, approaching the figure with a postcolonial lens, notes how Jewish ownership of Muslim slaves put wealthy Jewish individuals and Muslims in close contact.6 This further supports the proposal that, if the Wicked Son was perceived as specifically Muslim, Jewish viewers or users of the Rylands Haggadah would associate the figure with slavery on an intimate level.
The effect of the above associations with slavery—color symbolism, posture, relationship to text, and possible Muslim identity—revolve around casting the Wicked Son as foreign, which was a condition for medieval enslavement. The Wicked Son’s aggression, armor, and sense of active invasion is deeply tied to his foreignness. Therefore, a Seder-goer who “chooses” the Wicked Son by behaving apathetically towards ritual accepts also his perceived foreignness, opening a door to a fear looming large over the Passover seder: the possibility of becoming unfree. The moral choice presented by the Four Sons suddenly becomes more real as viewers are reminded of current systems of slavery and their proximity to unfree individuals. It is not out of the question for the Rylands Haggadah to emphasize its users’ freedom by calling attention to those close by who are unfree. Doing so within the structure of the Wicked Son turns this message, implicit in dark-skinned servants across several haggadot, into a purposeful educational tool.
Footnotes
- Additionally, Harris contends that if the figure is meant to be Muslim, he may be meant to “embody his peoples’ lack of written language and history—a condition diametrically opposed to that of the Jews.” While this interpretation may require additional support, this hypothesis supports the layered meaning of Wicked Child in relation to the freedom to read and interpret traditional texts. ↩︎
- Julie Harris. 2005. “Good Jews, Bad Jews, and No Jews at All – Ritual Imagery and Social Standards in the Catalan Haggadot.” In Church, State, Vellum, and Stone: Essays on Medieval Spain in Honor of John Williams, 26:275—96. The Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World. Brill. ↩︎
- Pamela Patton. “What Did Medieval Slavery Look Like? Color, Race, and Unfreedom in Later Medieval Iberia.” Speculum 97, no. 3 (July 2022). ↩︎
- Harris, “Good Jews, Bad Jews,” 286. ↩︎
- In the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, as Christians gained more control of the Iberian Peninsula, most enslaved individuals were Muslims captured in battle. Color symbolism associating black or dark colors with barbarity, depravity, and sin emerged as a method to visually and symbolically separate enslaved Muslims from free Muslims.As this visual lexicon proliferated, it became more effective at portraying Muslims as immoral, therefore constructing a rationale for their enslavement. Patton, “What Did Medieval Slavery Look Like?,” 660, 695-697. ↩︎
- Jane Barlow. “The Muslim Warrior at the Seder Meal.” In Postcolonising the Medieval Image, 218—40. Routledge, 2019. 232. ↩︎
Bibliography
Aristotle. “Aristotle, Poetics (C.350-330 BCE).” In Reader in Tragedy: An Anthology of Classical Criticism to Contemporary Theory, edited by Marcus Nevitt and Tanya Pollard. Methuen Drama, 2019.
Brown, Carolyn E. “Juliet’s Taming of Romeo.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 36, no. 2 (1996): 333—55. https://doi.org/10.2307/450952.
Petrarch, Francesco. Sonnets and Shorter Poems. Translated by David R. Slavitt. Harvard University Press, 2012.
Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Edited by Peter Holland. Penguin Books, 2016.
Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Device.” In Theory of Prose, translated by Benjamin Sher, 1—14. Dalkey Archive Press, 1990.
Whittier, Gayle. “The Sonnet’s Body and the Body Sonnetized in ‘Romeo and Juliet.’” Shakespeare Quarterly 40, no. 1 (1989): 27—41. https://doi.org/10.2307/2870752.
Author Commentary / Tali Goldman
I wrote this paper for Professor Pamela Patton’s course ART 431, Art, Culture, and Identity in Medieval Spain. When Professor Patton suggested that I work on the Wicked Son in the Rylands Haggadah, I dove into existing literature on the figure. In class, we had discussed how the figure relates to the medieval Iberian practice of color symbolism, which reflected not the actual skin tone of certain individuals but used dark pigment to communicate negative traits and status, creating a visual lexicon around ideas of freedom/unfreedom. Provided that a biblical redemption from slavery is a key theme of Passover, it was surprising that scholars had not discussed this depiction of the Wicked Son through the lens of slavery, focusing instead primarily on the figure’s aggressive tone.
Slowly but surely, I used visual and comparative analysis as well as secondary sources to reinterpret the pedagogical function of the Wicked Son. Ultimately, a multi-layered thesis emerged. I argue how the depiction and placement of the Wicked Son on the folio—a tense, unfamiliar warrior confronting the very words of the manuscript— not only reflects the Wicked Son as a heretical threat, but casts him as foreign, a characterization which would have been associated with slavery at the time. I was then able to connect a dual understanding of the Wicked Son as both a warrior and unfree person to the significance of freedom as a theme of the Passover seder.By adding to and complicating prior interpretations, I contributed a more nuanced understanding of this figure. While scholars had looked at the image through cultural or religious lenses, I sought to combine multiple approaches, allowing me to understand the social and religious significance of the figure in the very specific context of race and slavery in medieval Iberia, which manifested visually in a wide variety of manuscripts from several religions/cultures during the medieval period. Writing this paper allowed me to approach nuanced and difficult topics of religion, race, and othering—which were understood differently in medieval times than in the modern period—with an art historical lens. In decoding a confusing image, I thought through ways in which the cultural and social reality in medieval Iberia influenced the private lives and traditions of people of several different religious/social practices.
Editor Commentary / Katherine Jiho Lee
One important way in which scholars intervene in academic writing is by examining non-textual, creative sources. In her analysis of the Rylands Haggadah, a 14th-century manuscript, Tali uses illustrations rather than quotes as her evidence to explore how specific visual details were chosen to communicate specific themes and pedagogical messages to a medieval Jewish audience. Focusing on the depictions of the Wicked Son, rather than simply describing what the illustrations show, she intervenes by treating them as a form of argument. This makes it possible to “close read” how that argument is supported and communicated through visual details and cultural connotations, including the Wicked Son’s skin tone, interaction with the text, and stereotypical physical features. By situating this imagery within broader artistic and historical contexts, the author connects the visual representation of the Wicked Son to deeper tensions between historical themes including freedom versus enslavement and belonging versus otherness.
Through this art historical lens, Tali also complicates prior interpretations of the Wicked Son and introduces a compelling motive that runs throughout her paper, merging cultural, religious, and social perspectives to offer a deeper understanding of the figure and its significance. She is able to make an original contribution to the literature by identifying a more nuanced role played by the Wicked Son than that interpreted by previous scholarship. In particular, although scholars have traditionally portrayed this character as a representation of the danger of rejecting Jewish tradition, Tali argues that the Wicked Son also plays the role of soldier and enslaved individual to represent both biblical and contemporary (i.e., medieval) slavery, ultimately demonstrating how depictions of foreignness impacted the pedagogical purpose of the haggadah. Thus, analyzing art as real discourse rather than decoration constitutes one way that writers can make original contributions to ongoing conversations, identify what is new or not obvious, and innovate inventive interventions.
