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The Sarajevo Haggadah is one of the oldest Sephardic Haggadot in the world. It probably originated around 1350 in Barcelona. The word "Haggadah" is Hebrew and means "telling," as in storytelling. It is a Jewish text that sets forth the order of the Passover Seder.
It is 16.5 cm x 22.8 cm in size, (roughly 6.5 by 9 inches), and is composed of 142 leaves of parchment made out of extraordinarily thin, bleached calf skin.
The first 34 leaves feature 69 illuminated miniatures showing the Creation of the World, slavery in Egypt, coming out of Egypt under Moses' leadership, and beyond, all the way to the succession of Joshua, son of Nun. It also has numerous decorated initials and incipits, richly decorated with copper and gold.
The last four miniatures are an exception, in that they are not biblical in character.
The next 50 leaves contain the text of the Haggadah, written on both the recto and the verso in Hebrew, in the mediaeval, Spanish-type square script.
The last part of the book is a subsequently added poetic/ceremonial appendix containing poems by some of the most famous Hebrew poets from the golden era of Hebrew literature (10th–13th century).
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Wine stains on the pages also indicate that the manuscript was actually used at numerous Passover Sedarim.
Furthermore, the manuscript has had a tumultuous history, having been nearly destroyed several times during World War II and the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s, but has thankfully survived to the present day and was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World register in 2017.
UNESCO's Memory of the World (MoW) Programme is an international initiative launched to safeguard the documentary heritage of humanity against collective amnesia, neglect, decay over time and climatic conditions, as well as deliberate destruction.
It calls for the preservation of valuable archival holdings, library collections, and private individual compendia all over the world for posterity, the reconstitution of dispersed or displaced documentary heritage, and increased accessibility to, and dissemination of, these items.
Inclusion on the register leads to improved conservation by calling upon the program's networks of experts to exchange information and raise resources for the preservation, digitization, and dissemination of the material.
Description
The Sarajevo Haggadah is handwritten on the recto and verso in Hebrew, using square script typical for medieval Spain, on bleached calfskin vellum and illuminated with some gold.
It opens with 34 pages of illustrations of key scenes in the Bible from creation through the death of Moses.
Its pages are stained with wine, evidence that it was used at many Passover Seders.
It may have been a present for the wedding of members of two prominent families, Shoshan and Elazar, because their coats of arms – a shield with a rosette/rose (shoshan in Hebrew) and a wing (elazar in Hebrew) – are featured on the page showing the coat of arms of the city of Barcelona.
The Golden Haggadah in the British Library is another medieval book from Catalonia, a few decades older.
From Museum of the Jewish People
The Sarajevo Haggadah is the most famous Haggadah, and perhaps the most beautiful one, and it has endured for generations. Written on bleached calf skin, its colors have been preserved for hundreds of years thanks to the rare minerals in use at the time. It is a long Haggadah that also includes additional texts – all conveyed through splendid illustrations. The last section contains illustrations relating to Passover customs, as well as a prayer book with liturgical poems and prayers for Passover.
The name of the Haggadah is misleading because it wasn’t produced in Sarajevo, but rather in Barcelona. According to most accounts, this iconic Haggadah was written in 1350, at the time of the Black Death bubonic plague in the region. Although many Jews died during the plague, it led to a rise in antisemitism. Throughout Europe, ugly conspiracies and rumors were spread that blamed the Jews for the plague because they allegedly poisoned the wells.
From Museum of the Jewish People
The pogroms of 1391 resulted in the decimation of the Jewish community in Barcelona. Prior to that, the Catalonian city was an important center of religious learning. In addition, the wealthy Jews of Spain commissioned quite a few beautiful Haggadahs like this one.
The Sarajevo Haggadah is just one of those Haggadahs that were produced in Spain during that period. They were used by affluent Jewish families on Passover Eve, and some of them can now be found in different museums around the world.
The wine stains on the Sarajevo Haggadah prove that it wasn’t created for the sole purpose of decorating a bookshelf. Rather, people actually read from it at the seder table. Some believe that it was commissioned as a wedding gift for a wealthy young couple in Barcelona.
The Sarajevo Haggadah is one of the oldest Sephardic Haggadahs still in existence, and its elaborate illustrations adorn the handwritten text. The style and decorations are reminiscent of some Christian and Muslim illustrations from the Middle Ages. That is because this Haggadah is a remnant of the Golden Age of Spain before the Jews were expelled – a period during which they were reciprocal influences between the religions.
From Museum of the Jewish People
This specific Haggadah was discovered in Sarajevo at the end of the 19th century. Since then, countless books and research studies have been written about it. Scores of reproductions have been made it, as well as facsimile editions.
As noted above, the Haggadah was produced in Spain, but spent most of its life in Sarajevo, where it still is today – on display under very tight security at the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is considered the most important and most valuable of the three million artifacts displayed at the museum. The great interest that it generates cannot be attributed solely to its beauty. Rather, the story of its heroic survival also serves as a symbol of the resilience of the Jewish people as a whole.
Initially, the Sarajevo Haggadah – before it knew it would be called that – survived the expulsion from Spain. Historians believe that it taken out of Spain during the expulsion, and perhaps even beforehand, and made its way to Italy. The deed written in Hebrew characters, which was found inside the Haggadah, attests to the fact that its owner sold it in Italy in 1510. A signature of approval provided in 1609 by a church censor in Italy named Giovanni Vistorini indicates that the Haggadah was still in Italy one hundred years later, and most likely in Venice.
From Museum of the Jewish People
It is not clear when the Haggadah left Italy, but many of the expelled Jews from Spain made their way to Sarajevo via Salonica, which could very well explain how the Haggadah also got to Sarajevo. In 1894, the National Museum purchased it from the Sarajevan Sephardic family Koen for the sum of 150 crowns; the Bosnian National Museum had been founded not long before that in Sarajevo while the city was under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Since then, the Haggadah has been associated with the city of Sarajevo. But many more perils still awaited the ancient manuscript.
You’ve probably had occasion to hear about Hitler’s heinous plan to establish the “Museum of the Extinct Race” in Prague. Whether such an intention existed or not, the Nazis did confiscate Judaica items and other Jewish property wherever they invaded, including the museum in Sarajevo. They demanded that its director hand over the ancient Haggadah to them.
The Christian director of the museum told them that the Haggadah had already been given to another Nazi who got there before them. Darwish Korkut, the museum’s Muslim librarian, risked his own life to rescue it. He took the Haggadah home with him and hid it there.
He later found a hiding place inside a mosque located in a village outside Sarajevo. That same librarian and his wife also risked their lives when they hid a Jewish girl in their home during the war.
From Museum of the Jewish People
The majority of Sarajevo’s Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. But the ancient Haggadah, which remained hidden throughout World War II, survived and was returned to the National Museum after it ended. But for the Sarajevo Haggadah, this was not its last war.
The Bosnian War broke out in the 1990’s following the disintegration of the Yugoslavian Republic. The museum found itself on the front line during the siege on Sarajevo. Thousands of people were killed in the city, including the museum director at the time, Dr. Rizo Sijaric, who was hit by a hand grenade thrown at the museum. Apart from the loss of life, there was other damage, such as windows shattered by blasts and looting by thieves.
Furthermore, the basement of the museum, where the Haggadah was stored, was flooded by rain. It was later hidden in the safe of the Bosnian Central Bank until the end of the war.
All the hardships experienced by the Haggadah did, however, leave their mark. Once it became clear that the manuscript required urgent restoration, Jakob Finci, the president of the Jewish community in Bosnia, launched a fundraising campaign designed to rescue it. He managed to raise money for the restoration, and at the beginning of the current millennium a special vault was dedicated at the museum, where the Haggadah is on display together with priceless Christian and Muslim documents.
From Museum of the Jewish People
But in recent years, the Sarajevo Haggadah has faced new uncertainties due to the precarious financial situation of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, stemming from a shortage of government funding. Nonetheless, the Haggadah has remained at the museum the entire time, even after the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York offered to borrow it for a few years.
It was not, of course, the only museum that wanted to borrow the manuscript (including the Israel Museum). But due to unresolved legal issues between the museum in Sarajevo and the Bosnian and Herzegovinian government, a legal solution has not yet been found which will enable other museums to borrow the Haggadah.
The financial problems continued to get worse, and the National Museum had to close its doors in 2012. The fate of the Haggadah was unclear. Following demonstrations and protests, the museum reopened in 2015. Two years later, and for the first time in over twenty years, the Haggadah was removed from the vault so pictures could be taken of it. This was a rare event because film crews were normally not allowed to photograph the Haggadah outside its protective glass case. A Walla! News team from Israel, headed by Dov Gil-Har, were among the lucky ones to witness the wonder. With a sense of reverence, they documented the removal of the Haggadah by one of the museum employees, who was dressed in a white robe and wore white gloves. Numerous precautions were taken to safeguard the rare artifact that people from all over the world would come to see at the museum.
From Museum of the Jewish People
A Walla! News team from Israel, headed by Dov Gil-Har, were among the lucky ones to witness the wonder. With a sense of reverence, they documented the removal of the Haggadah by one of the museum employees, who was dressed in a white robe and wore white gloves. Numerous precautions were taken to safeguard the rare artifact that people from all over the world would come to see at the museum.
People of the Book, the historical novel by the Australian Pulitzer Prize winner, Geraldine Brooks, focuses primarily on the mystery surrounding the Haggadah’s survival and its harrowing journeys over the centuries. And to quote the blurb of the Hebrew edition: “People of the Book is based on the true story of the Sarajevo Haggadah, and it revives unforgettable voices from the past in a language and tempo of the 21st century.”
History
In 1941, when the Nazis occupied Sarajevo, one of the first objects they sought out was the Sarajevo Haggadah. However, thanks to the wit and ingenuity of the director of the National Museum, Jozo Petrović, and the museum’s curator, Mr. Derviš Korkut, the Haggadah was kept out of the Nazis' reach.
It is unclear what happened to the Haggadah during World War II but there are several legends that surround its safekeeping. One account says that the director of the museum took the book to a mosque in a village up on Mount Bjelašnica, where the imam hid it beneath the threshold of the mosque.
Another legend claims that it lay buried beneath a tree for the duration of the war.
According to Sarajevo's Jewish Humanitarian Society, the book was most likely tucked away on a hidden bookshelf in the library at the National Museum.
Whatever may have happened, the book resurfaced at the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1945. The Sarajevo Haggadah was kept in the museum until 1992, when the institution, along with the entire city, came under siege.
History
In 1992 during the Bosnian War, the Haggadah manuscript survived a museum break-in and a flooding of the museum's basements, where the safe with the Haggadah was located. University of Sarajevo archeologist, Professor Enver Imamović, who assumed directorship of the Museum at the time, asked police to enter premises with him and search and rescue the book. It was discovered, by one account, in the safe, and the other on the floor, during the police investigation by a local Inspector. Many other items thieves believed were not valuable were also left scattered around.
From the museum it was taken into an underground Central Bank vault, where it was kept in secrecy and survived the Siege of Sarajevo by Serb forces, where it waited for better days to come. While the war in Sarajevo raged on, there were speculations that the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina had sold the book to buy arms and that the book had been destroyed.
In 1995, to quell rumors that the government had sold the Haggadah in order to buy weapons, the president of Bosnia presented the manuscript at a community Seder. U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman (from Connecticut) challenged the Bosnian government by declaring that he would come to Sarajevo for Passover if the Sarajevo Haggadah would be placed on the table.
Restoration and Conservation (Wikipedia)
In 2001, concerned with the possible continuing deterioration of the Sarajevo Haggadah which was stored in a city bank vault under less than ideal conditions, Dr. Jakob Finci, the head of Sarajevo’s Jewish Community, appealed to Jacques Paul Klein, the Special Representative of the Secretary General and Coordinator of United Nations Operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, for his assistance in ensuring the preservation and restoration of this priceless historical treasure.
Klein quickly agreed and developed a plan to secure the required funding, identify an internationally recognized expert to undertake the restoration, and make space available in the United Nations Headquarters building where the restoration efforts could begin.
When the project became public knowledge, Klein was surprised at reticence of some local Bosnian officials to support the project. Only after informing President Izetbegovic of their obstructionism and letting him know that the International Community would take a dim view of their total lack of cooperation in the restoration efforts did the President clear the way for the restoration project to begin.
Restoration and Conservation (Wikipedia)
Klein initiated an international campaign to raise the required funding. Contributions came from individuals, institutions, embassies and governments from around the world. With funding in hand and with Dr. Pataki, from Stuttgart’s Akademie Der Bildenden Künste, ready to begin the restoration project a climate-controlled room was refurbished in Sarajevo’s National Museum to house the Haggadah as the centerpiece, surrounded by documents of the Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim faiths.
Additionally, as a beau geste to the City of Sarajevo, a second climate-controlled vault was funded to house the national archives of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
New Vault Room (Wikipedia)
On 2 December 2002, the vault room was dedicated by the Special Representative of the Secretary General in the presence of senior Bosnian government officials, the diplomatic community and international media as well as the public. The Sarajevo Haggadah and other sacred and historical religious documents had, at last, found a worthy home.
In October 2012, the Haggadah's future exhibition was left in limbo following a drought in funding for the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which shuttered its doors after going bankrupt and not paying its employees for almost a year.
In 2013 the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art attempted to arrange for a loan of the Haggadah, but due to internal political battles within Bosnia and Herzegovina, the loan was eventually refused by Bosnia's National Monuments Preservation Commission. However, the Haggadah was again on display as of September 2015, following the National Museum's re-opening.
History
This priceless masterpiece of medieval Judaica most likely originated in 14th century Spain and may have been a wedding present, celebrating the union of two families whose coats of arms appear in the bottom corners of the book.
The Haggadah left Spain after the Alhambra Degree expelled Jews in 1492; it traveled throughout Europe, and most likely arrived in Sarajevo with Jews who found refuge here during the 16th century; notes in the margin would indicate this.
The National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina acquired the book in 1894, after which it was sent to Vienna for authentication, and then it miraculously returned to Sarajevo a few years later. After this point, the story of the Haggadah becomes as intricate as the story of Sarajevo itself, and it has become a symbol of the survival and perseverance of the city.
Until 2002, when a permanent exhibit hall was opened to display the Haggadah, the book was kept deep in the manuscript section of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina and was seen only by those lucky enough to have special access, and yet, everyone was aware of the book’s existence.
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"The Book of Exodus"
Full title, "The Book of Exodus: a double rescue in wartime Sarajevo," Geraldine Brooks, The New Yorker, December 3, 2007.
When the Axis powers conquered and divided Yugoslavia, in the spring of 1941, Sarajevo did not fare well. The city suddenly found itself absorbed into the Nazi puppet state of Croatia, its tolerant, cosmopolitan culture crushed by the invading German Army and the Croatian Fascist Ustashe. Hitler’s ally, Ante Pavelic, proclaimed that his new state must be “cleansed” of Jews and Serbs: “Not a stone upon a stone will remain of what once belonged to them.”
The terror began on April 16th, when the German Army entered Sarajevo and sacked the city’s eight synagogues. The Sarajevo pinkas, a complete record of the Jewish community from its earliest days, was sent to Prague and was never recovered. Deportations followed. Jews, Gypsies, and Serbian resisters turned frantically to sympathetic Muslim or Croat neighbors to hide them. Fear of denunciation spread through the city, penetrating every workplace, even the imposing neo-Renaissance halls of the Bosnian National Museum.
"The Book of Exodus"
Full title, "The Book of Exodus: a double rescue in wartime Sarajevo," Geraldine Brooks, The New Yorker, December 3, 2007.
The museum’s chief librarian, an Islamic scholar named Dervis Korkut, was an unlikely figure of resistance, but he had already made his anti-Fascist feelings clear, in an article defending the city’s beleaguered Jews. A handsome, dapper man with a neatly trimmed mustache, he wore well-tailored three-piece suits complemented by a fez. In early 1942, when Korkut heard that a Nazi commander, General Johann Fortner, had arrived at the museum to speak to its director, he immediately feared for the museum library’s greatest treasure, a masterpiece of medieval Judaica known as the Sarajevo Haggadah.
There were rumors at the time of Hitler’s nascent plan for a “Museum of an Extinct Race.” Synagogues and community buildings in the Jewish quarter of Prague, had been spared destruction so that, when all of Europe’s Jews had been obliterated, it could become a caricature “Jew Town” for Aryan tourists to visit, populated by Czech actors in Hasidic garb. The museum’s future exhibits would eventually fill fifty warehouses.
"The Book of Exodus"
Full title, "The Book of Exodus: a double rescue in wartime Sarajevo," Geraldine Brooks, The New Yorker, December 3, 2007.
The best of Europe’s Judaica was being amassed as part of the general plunder under the authority of Alfred Rosenberg, the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Rosenberg’s collection was intended to facilitate a new branch of scholarship: Jewish studies without Jews.
Hitler admired Rosenberg’s impeccable Fascist aesthetics (Rosenberg had decried Expressionism as “syphilitic”) and in 1940 had directed the Wehrmacht to extend all possible assistance to his unit. By the war’s end, the Germans had looted more than thirty thousand items of Judaica— silk Torah mantles, prayer shawls, silver ritual cups and dishes, and portraits, kitchenware, and other domestic items that reflected centuries of Jewish life. And there were more than a hundred thousand Yiddish and Hebrew books. The Sarajevo Haggadah could easily have been one of them.
"The Book of Exodus"
Full title, "The Book of Exodus: a double rescue in wartime Sarajevo," Geraldine Brooks, The New Yorker, December 3, 2007.
Korkut probably hadn’t heard of Hitler’s museum, but he had seen ancient Torah scrolls destroyed in Sarajevo’s streets. When the museum’s director, a respected Croatian archeologist who did not speak German, called for Korkut to act as a translator, a few minutes before his meeting with Fortner, Korkut pleaded to be allowed to take the Haggadah and keep it out of Nazi hands. The director was reluctant. “You will be risking your life,” he warned. Korkut replied that as kustos—custodian of the library’s two hundred thousand volumes—the book was his responsibility. So the two men hurried to the basement, where the Haggadah was kept in a safe whose combination only the director knew. He took the book from a protective box and handed it to Korkut.
Korkut lifted his coat and tucked the small codex, which measured about six by nine inches, into the waistband of his trousers. He smoothed his jacket, making sure that no bulges broke the line of his suit, and the two men made their way back upstairs to face the general. The man so determined to protect a Jewish book was the scion of a prosperous, highly regarded family of Muslim intellectuals, famous for producing judges of Islamic law.
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Discussion of People of the Book
Geraldine Brooks