The Shohet (from “Had Gadya”)

Menachem Birnbaum

1920

Illustration of man in a bloody apron holding a bloody knife as he begins to slaughter a large animal.
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Creator Bio

Menachem Birnbaum

1893–1944?

Born in Vienna, the book illustrator and portrait painter Menachem Birnbaum was the son of the ideologically peripatetic activist Nathan Birnbaum. He lived in Berlin from 1911 to 1914 and then from 1919 to 1933, when he moved to the Netherlands. He was arrested by the Germans in 1943. The violence and horror of his expressionist illustrations of the song “Had Gadya” (from the Passover seder) are a commentary on the tumult of World War I and its aftermath.

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