Hitler’s Haggadah

Nissim ben Shimon wrote a famous parody of the traditional Passover story, after the liberation of Morocco by the Allies from the repressive Vichy regime. Writing in Judeo-Arabic, he fashioned the tale as a Seder, using the iconic characters to tell the tale of contemporary persecution against the Jews of Morocco and their subsequent liberation. In his version of the Four Sons, the wise son is the British, the wicked son is Hitler, the simple son is the Americans, and the son who does not know how to ask a question is Roosevelt. “He who brought us forth out of Egypt” is fashioned after General De Gaulle and Rabbi Akiva is General Montgomery. He may have been associated with a figure named Simon Coiffeur, a hairdresser from Rabat, Morocco.