Sarajevo Haggadah

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Sarajevo Haggadah was made around 1350 in the Kingdom of Aragon, most likely in Barcelona, when Sephardic Jewish communities in Christian Spain produced some of the most lavishly illustrated Hebrew manuscripts of the Middle Ages. It is written on one hundred forty two leaves of bleached calfskin vellum, so thin the parchment is almost translucent, illuminated with gold leaf and rich pigment. The manuscript opens with thirty four leaves of sixty nine painted miniatures running from Creation through the early history of Israel, ending with Joshua taking up Moses's succession, a visual retelling set before the Haggadah's own text begins. What follows is the Passover Haggadah proper, the blessings, questions and readings recited at the Seder table, in medieval Sephardic Hebrew square script, closing with a set of Hebrew liturgical poems.

Scholars believe the manuscript was made as a wedding gift. Early in the book, the coats of arms of two Sephardic families, the Shoshan and the Elazar households, appear beside the arms of Barcelona itself, read as marking a marriage joining the two families under the city's own seal. Its wine stained pages are a second kind of evidence: unlike a showpiece kept only for display, this Haggadah was carried to the table and used, Passover after Passover, exactly as intended.

Its style belongs to the same Catalan illuminated tradition as the roughly contemporary Golden Haggadah, and it stands among the finest surviving examples of the genre. Who painted it is not recorded; what survives is the manuscript itself, unusually complete for a six hundred seventy year old book that left its origin within two lifetimes of its making and crossed Europe before coming to rest in Sarajevo.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In the spring of 1941, Axis forces occupied Yugoslavia, and Sarajevo came under a regime that persecuted its Jewish community alongside the Nazi occupiers. The National Museum's Haggadah, one of the world's most valuable Jewish manuscripts, became a target when a German general arrived intending to seize it. Dervis Korkut, the museum's Muslim chief librarian, had already hidden the manuscript, carried out of the vault in his own clothing, and told the officer a German colleague had already taken it. Korkut then carried the Haggadah to a Muslim village on Mount Bjelasnica, where a local cleric hid it inside a mosque among Qurans and other Islamic texts for the rest of the war. Korkut and his wife also sheltered a Jewish girl, Mira Papo; decades later, as an elderly woman in Israel, Papo helped protect Korkut's own daughter during the siege of Sarajevo. In 1994 Yad Vashem recognized Dervis and Servet Korkut as Righteous Among the Nations.

The manuscript faced danger again during the Bosnian War. Amid the 1992 siege of Sarajevo, the museum was broken into and its basement flooded; the Haggadah was recovered and moved to a vault beneath Bosnia's central bank, kept secret through the rest of the siege. In 1995, President Alija Izetbegovic presented it publicly at a community Seder, to dispel rumors the wartime government had sold it to buy weapons. After the war, an international fundraising campaign supported its conservation, and the manuscript returned to public display. It was named a national monument of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2003 and inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2017, a small book that survived expulsion, two wars and at least two deliberate attempts to destroy it, protected each time by people outside its own faith.