37 Map

Abraham bar Jacob         

Amsterdam, 1711

paper, engraving

Gift of Mrs. Benőné Benőné neé. Irén Schlesinger, 1916

One of the oldest Hebrew maps appeared in the Amsterdam edition of the Haggadah.  The Amsterdam Haggadah richly illustrated with engravings was first published in 1695. It introduced a whole new iconographic approach to haggadah illustration that was borrowed subsequently in haggadot and on other items related to Passover.  The artist, Abraham bar Jacob was a convert to Judaism, who borrowed most of the illustrations from Mathaeus Merian’s protestant Bible illustrations published in 1625–1630. The map he copied from Christian Adrichom’s map of th Holy Land of 1588. The letters used for the printing were cut by Miklós Misztótfalusi Kis (1650–1702), a forerunner of Hungarian printing during his studies in Amsterdam, who, before returning to Hungary, sold his fonts to a local printer. The map depicts the stages of the forty years of wandering of the Jews in the desert from Egypt to the Holy Land and the settling of the tribes.