ABSTRACT
Mediaeval Judaism and Christianity each claimed to be God's chosen people. Judaism's claim was buttressed by its biological and communal continuity from the biblical chosen people, and by its continued adherence to Torah's legal instructions, despite Israel's exile and the lack of the Jerusalem Temple. Christianity's claim to supersede Judaism as chosen was buttressed by its ascendancy and florescence, coupled with the downtrodden state of the Jews, dated and attributed to the Jewish rejection of Jesus and his followers transition from supposed biblical literalism. The Jewish images are analysed from three related illuminated manuscripts of the Passover Haggadah: British Library Additional Manuscript; British Library Oriental Manuscripts and the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina's 'Sarajevo Haggadah'. Members of the Jewish minority in fourteenth-century Christian Spain used the identical historicising device as did the clergy of the Christian majority: prefacing a liturgical work, for the Jews, the 'Passover Haggadah', and for the Christians, the 'Psalter', with a historicising pictorial cycle.
