Pâque

The founding narrative is found in chapter 12 of the Book of Exodus (Shemot). Israel, enslaved in Egypt, experiences deliverance when God commands each household to slaughter a lamb at twilight on the fourteenth day of the first month, to daub its blood on the doorposts and lintel of their doors, and to consume the roasted flesh accompanied by unleavened bread (matzot) and bitter herbs. The name of the feast itself is linked by the text to the verb passah, "to pass over, to spare": the destroying angel who strikes down the firstborn of Egypt "passes over" the dwellings marked with blood [Exodus 12]. The hasty departure, before the dough had time to rise, grounds the prohibition against leaven that defines the feast. Historians debate the antiquity and composition of this narrative — some see in it a fusion of a spring pastoral festival (the lamb) and an agricultural festival of the first harvest (unleavened bread) — but the centrality of the Exodus to Israelite identity is attested by the oldest layers of the Hebrew Bible. Passover thus connects an immemorial seasonal rite to a theology of liberation.

With the centralization of worship in Jerusalem, promoted by the Deuteronomic reform attributed to King Josiah in the 7th century before the common era, Passover ceased to be a strictly domestic rite to become a pilgrimage. Deuteronomy commands that Passover be slaughtered "at the place that the Lord will choose" [Deuteronomy 16], that is, at the unique sanctuary. In the times of the Second Temple, Pessah became one of the three pilgrimage festivals (shalosh regalim), along with Shavuot and Sukkot, drawing considerable crowds toward Jerusalem. The lamb was slaughtered in the courtyard, its blood poured upon the altar, then the roasted meat was consumed in small groups (havourot) during the night. The historian Flavius Josephus, a witness of the 1st century, evokes the massive influx of pilgrims around the paschal sacrifice, illustrating the logistical and spiritual scale of the festival on the eve of the Judeo-Roman war. The destruction of the Temple by Rome in 70 of the common era abruptly interrupted this sacrificial system, forcing Judaism to entirely reinvent the celebration.

Deprived of sacrifice, nascent rabbinic Judaism reconstructed Passover around the family table. The Mishna, compiled around the year 200, devotes an entire treatise to the subject, Pessahim, whose last chapter describes the ordering of the ritual meal: the cups of wine, the recitation, the child's questions, the matzot, the bitter herbs. This Seder ("order") substitutes for the blood of the lamb speech and narrative: one no longer sacrifices, one recounts. Historians have emphasized how this form dialogues with the culture of the Greco-Roman banquet — the symposion — where one reclines, where one drinks by regulated cups and where one converses according to an agreed order. Tradition and archive answer each other here: the Jewish rite adopts forms of conviviality of its time to fill them with its own content, the transmission of the Exodus. The central obligation becomes pedagogical — to explain to one's children why this night differs from all others — making the hearth the new sanctuary and the father of the family the officiant.

The text recited during the Seder is called the Haggadah ("narrative, telling"), from the biblical commandment ve-higgadta le-vinkha, "you shall tell your son." Developed gradually from Mishnaic and Talmudic traditions, the Haggadah interweaves biblical passages, midrashic commentaries, blessings, psalms of thanksgiving (Hallel) and popular songs. It incorporates the rabbinic development of the verse "An Aramean wandering was my father" (Deuteronomy 26), the ten plagues, the enumeration of divine mercies (Dayenou), and the four sons who represent four ways of receiving tradition. It is one of the most copied, illuminated and printed Jewish texts in history: the Haggadah of Sarajevo, a Spanish manuscript from the fourteenth century, is one of its jewels, and the first printed editions multiplied from the late fifteenth century onward. Translated into all the languages of the diasporas, adorned by each community according to its taste, it stands as an exceptional witness to Jewish art, liturgy and vitality through the centuries.

No Jewish holiday imposes such meticulous material preparation as Passover. The Torah forbids not only consuming, but also possessing hametz — any leavened dough derived from five grains — during the seven days (eight in the diaspora) of the festival. This prohibition gives rise to a domestic purification ritual: general cleaning, the search for leaven on the eve of the festival (bedikat hametz), its destruction (bi'our), and, for what cannot be destroyed, its symbolic sale to a non-Jew (mekhirat hametz). Unleavened bread, matza, baked in less than eighteen minutes to prevent any fermentation, becomes both "bread of affliction" and "bread of freedom." Customs differ: Ashkenazi communities traditionally abstain from kitniyot — legumes, rice, corn — a practice that most Sephardic communities do not share, permitting rice at the Passover table. This divergence, debated to this day, illustrates how a common law bends to the local histories of the diasporas.

Passover varies according to communities. The Hebrew calendar fixes its beginning on 15 Nisan, at the full moon of spring, the first night of the Seder; in the diaspora, a second Seder is celebrated, a legacy of ancient uncertainty about the fixing of months by observation. Culinary and musical traditions sharply distinguish the Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Italian, and Oriental worlds, each with its own melodies of Haggadah and its dishes — from harosset with textures and flavors that vary by country. One singular case merits mention: the Samaritans, a community that traces back to the ancient Israelites of the North, continue each year to sacrifice the Paschal lamb on Mount Gerizim, near Nablus, perpetuating the biblical sacrifice where Rabbinic Judaism renounced it after 70. This persistence offers the historian a living testimony, almost archaeological, of a practice that the Bible describes and that majority Judaism has transposed into a table ritual. Tradition and archive nearly converge there.

Festival of Freedom, Passover has nourished throughout the centuries the hope and sometimes the suffering of Jews. In the Middle Ages, the Paschal season was sadly the scene of slanderous accusations — the so-called "blood libel" — which triggered persecutions and pogroms, the proximity to Christian Easter celebrations exacerbating tensions. But the festival was also refuge and resistance: the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising broke out on the eve of Passover, on April 19, 1943, conferring on the festival of liberation a tragic and heroic charge. In the camps, prisoners recited from memory fragments of the Haggadah; matzot were sometimes made at the risk of their lives. After the Shoah and with the rebirth of a Jewish State, the closing formula of the Seder — "Next year in Jerusalem" — took on new resonance. Passover thus remains the mirror in which the Jewish people ceaselessly reads its own history, between slavery and emancipation.

Moses / Moshé Rabbenou (traditional dates, not historically established) — Central figure in the Exodus narrative, Moses is presented by the Torah as the liberator sent to lead Israel out of Egypt and as the transmitter of the Law at Sinai. Remarkably, his name is almost entirely absent from the Haggadah, which emphasizes divine action rather than the individual. A founding figure of Passover memory, he embodies the passage from servitude to freedom, the heart of the festival. His historicity belongs to tradition, not to the archive.

King Josiah / Yoshiyahou (circa 648 – 609 before the common era) — King of Judah, he conducted, according to Deuteronomy and the book of Kings, a great religious reform centralizing worship in Jerusalem. The biblical narrative attributes to him a Passover celebration of unprecedented solemnity, marking the transformation of Passover into a pilgrimage to the unique sanctuary. His reign constitutes a decisive milestone, widely discussed by historians, in the evolution of the Passover rite.

Flavius Josephus / Yosef ben Matityahou (circa 37 – circa 100) — Greek-speaking Jewish historian, priest and then military commander during the war against Rome, he wrote The Jewish War and the Jewish Antiquities. His descriptions of the crowds of pilgrims and the paschal sacrifice at the Temple provide valuable testimony on first-century Passover, on the eve of the destruction in 70. His work remains a major source for the history of Judaism in the Second Temple period.

Rabbi Yehouda ha-Nassi (circa 135 – circa 217) — Leader of the Jewish people of Judea and traditional redactor of the Mishna around the year 200, he fixed in writing the oral teachings, including the tractate Pessahim which describes the ordering of the Seder after the disappearance of sacrifice. His undertaking allowed Judaism to survive the loss of the Temple by reconstructing Passover around speech and the home. He embodies the transition from sacrifice to narrative.

Rabban Gamliel (first century) — Master of the period of the Second Temple and the beginning of the rabbinic era, he is cited in the Mishna and the Haggadah for his teaching that whoever has not explained the three symbols — Pessah, matza and maror — has not fulfilled his duty. His formula still structures today the explanatory part of the Seder, making him a permanent voice at the Passover table.

Don Isaac Abravanel (1437 – 1508) — Statesman, financier and biblical commentator, expelled from Spain in 1492, he composed a famous commentary on the Haggadah, the Zevah Pessah, structured around a hundred questions. An emblematic figure of Sephardic Judaism in exile, he greatly enriched reflection on the festival of freedom at the very moment when his people were being driven out, giving the theme of deliverance poignant immediacy.

From the lamb sacrificed beneath the blood-stained lintels of Egypt to the glass of wine raised around a contemporary table, Passover runs through the entire Jewish history like an unbroken thread. It survived the destruction of the Temple by becoming narrative; it crossed the borders of the diasporas by bending to their languages, their flavors and their melodies; it resisted persecutions by becoming, even in the darkest hours, an act of Memory and hope. Its strength lies in a fertile paradox: a rite immutable in its structure, it requires of each person that they make it their own as their own liberation. In this, Pessah is not a fixed remembrance but a living pedagogy, transmitted aloud from one generation to the next. "Next year in Jerusalem": the final formula makes clear enough that Passover, turned toward a founding past, remains irreducibly tensioned toward the future.