During the Passover season, the Chicago Hebrew Bookstore faces competition from local supermarkets.
The West Rogers Park bookshop stocks about 250 editions of the Haggadah, the little prayer book that recounts the holiday’s story. Some editions preface the tale of the ancient Israelites’ liberation from bondage in Egypt with commentaries by the likes of Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel or the Vilna Gaon, an 18th Century giant of Talmudic studies. Others are lavishly illustrated or have hand-tooled leather bindings.
Yet none has sales figures to compare with a simple paperback version distributed by Maxwell House Coffee through its retail outlets. Since its birth in the 1930s, close to 40 million copies of the Maxwell House Haggadah have been put into circulation.
“It’s hard to compete,” said David Gross, a bookstore employee. “Theirs is free.”
That is not quite true. The coffee producer’s Haggadah theoretically is a premium given to purchasers of a can or two, but groceries often waive that requirement for regular customers. Or, for pretty much anyone who rushes in at the last minute needing extra copies for unexpected guests at their Seder, the ritual meal celebrated on Passover, which begins March 27 this year.
The coffeemaker’s Haggadah began as a quick-thinking advertising man’s gimmick. But it has achieved near canonical status, noted Arnold Fine, editor of the Jewish Press, a Brooklyn-based weekly newspaper.
“I grew up thinking the only place to get a Haggadah was at the grocery store,” said Fine, 78. “As a kid, I used to imagine coffee crossing the deserts of Sinai.”
A simple design
Rabbi Mitchell Wohlberg said that the standing of the Maxwell House edition is all the more remarkable given its unprepossessing appearance. Over the centuries, other editions have attracted a wealth of artistic talents, among them the modernist painter Ben Shahn. The Maxwell House Haggadah has a cover approximately the color of denim washed too many times. Its line drawings have a naive quality similar to those on the instruction sheets for assembling knocked-down furniture.
Yet no other version has achieved its hold over the Jewish-American imagination, said Wohlberg who has referred to it in his holiday sermons as, “the word of God as given down to Maxwell House.”
Wohlberg, rabbi of Beth Tfiloh, an Orthodox synagogue in Baltimore, observed that the company’s Passover offering has the force of nostalgia going for it, being the version upon which three generations of American Jews were raised. “It is almost as if it wouldn’t be an official Seder without two things,” Wohlberg said, “the Maxwell House Haggadah and wine stains on Mama’s tablecloth.”
He was referring to a part of the Seder recounting the plagues God sent Pharaoh when the Egyptian ruler balked at letting the Israelites go free. While reciting it, Jews flick away a few drops of wine from their goblets, as if to symbolically reduce their pleasure and thus acknowledge it is wrong to rejoice even at enemies’ misfortunes.
Literary references
The Maxwell House Haggadah has been celebrated in numerous literary works, including Myron S. Kaufmann’s novel “Remember Me to God.” When the Amsterdams, a Boston family, sit down to their World War II era Seder, they each pick up a Haggadah whose title page has “a six-pointed star, and at the bottom an inscription in four lines:
“Compliments of/MAXWELL HOUSE COFFEE/Good to the Last Drop/Kosher for Passover”
That link between the company’s motto and its annual Passover offering is the longest running product promotion in American retailing, according to Pat Riso, a spokesperson for Kraft Foods, which now owns the Maxwell House label.
Indeed, the Maxwell House Haggadah has been an integral part of Jewish life for so long that it has become a unit of historical measure. In recent decades, the traditional Seder sometimes has been updated with expressions of sympathy with other groups facing adversity and prejudice. There are now feminist, gay, Third World and pacifist Haggadot (the plural of the Hebrew word meaning narration). Their adherents refer to such celebrations of the holiday as “post-Maxwell House Seders.”
All of this began in the 1920s when a certain Col. Cheek wanted to crack the New York market with a blend of coffee used in his Maxwell House hotel in Nashville. Somehow, he was steered to Joseph Jacobs, who ran an advertising agency specializing in the Jewish market. Jacobs suggested they pitch the product as “Kosher for Passover.”
Jacobs’ son, Richard Jacobs, said that New York’s large Jewish immigrant community then avoided coffee during Passover, when certain foods are off-limits, including several types of beans. Jacobs proposed getting respected rabbis to vouch for coffee beans as being OK for Passover.
“Col. Cheek said to my father: `I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about, but let’s try it,'” said Richard Jacobs.
The experiment was a huge success, and Maxwell House became a New York staple. But in 1933 or ’34 (the exact date has been lost to memory), its market share was threatened by the A&P Co. A&P cut the cost of its brand of coffee by 8 cents a pound, a considerable savings in those Depression years.
To fight back, Jacobs dreamed up the idea of a special Passover promotion–a give-away Haggadah. According to his son, Jacobs went to a large wholesaler and said: “You’ve been ordering a few cases of Maxwell House, but now you’re going to take two railroad cars’ worth.”
When the wholesaler gulped, Jacobs showed him the prototype of the Haggadah and promised him a two-week exclusive on the product tie-in before he showed it to anyone else.
Marketing victory
“By the end of the two weeks, the wholesaler had Maxwell House in every independent grocery in town,” said Richard Jacobs. “The A&P was beat, and Maxwell House was back on top in New York.”
From there, the company expanded its vision and began sending Haggadot wherever it thought Jewish customers might be found. Currently, the company distributes about 800,000 copies each holiday season, dispatching them to every state in the nation.
Other companies marketing to a Jewish audience, most notably Empire Kosher and Manischewitz, also have sponsored Haggadot. Yet none has distributed even a tiny fraction as many as Maxwell House, which has printed enough Haggadot to provide every Jewish man, woman and child on Earth with three apiece.
That statistic is on Richard Jacobs’ mind during Passover. He usually hosts several dozen guests, some of whom bring fancy Haggadot. But his hand automatically reaches for the definitive edition–the Maxwell House Haggadah.
“And I’ll think to myself I’m such a lucky guy,” he said, “to have had a father so smart.”
