The most celebrated Passover haggadah in the world—probably the most famous medieval illustrated Hebrew manuscript, period—is the Sarajevo Haggadah. Written and illustrated in northern Spain in the first half of the 14th century, it first came to public notice in the late 19thcentury, when an impoverished young man named Joseph Cohen (or Koen) from the Sarajevo Jewish community sold it to the newly founded Imperial National Museum of Bosnia in order to take care of his family. Exactly how this haggadah reached Sarajevo, and how it eventually came into the hands of the Cohen family some 400 years after the Spanish Expulsion, is unknown, but the subsequent history of the book is the stuff of legend.
Almost immediately after acquiring it in 1894, the National Museum sent it off to Vienna to be restored—Sarajevo was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—and commissioned two German scholars to produce a facsimile of the Haggadah with introductory essays. It was the first facsimile of an illustrated medieval Hebrew book ever to be published. Appended to the volume was a lengthy essay by the Hungarian Jewish scholar, collector, and bibliophile David Kaufmann that launched the modern study of Jewish book art. Indeed, the lavish illustrations in the Haggadah were themselves something of a shock to most scholars. Until then, it was commonly believed that the second commandment prohibited Jews from making any sort of image, a conception the Haggadah's pictures dramatically belied. (Actually, the second commandment prohibits Jews from worshipping images, not making them.)
During World War II, after the fall of Sarajevo, the Nazis eagerly sought out the famous work in order to display it in the “Museum of the Extinct Race” that they were planning to build in Prague. It was saved by the museum's chief librarian, Dervis Korkut, a devout Moslem and Islamic scholar, who bravely lied to the Nazi general who demanded the book, telling him that it had already been taken, and then hid it throughout the war (he and his wife also sheltered a young Jewish woman and are included among the Righteous Gentiles at Yad Vashem).
A half-century later, during the terrible Balkan wars of the 1990s, the Sarajevo museum was bombed by the Serbs, but the Haggadah was saved again, hidden away in a bank vault by the museum's director, Enver ImamoviÄ?. Today, the Haggadah is on display in the newly restored National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where it is kept inside a tall, tower-like glass case in the museum's trophy room dedicated to Bosnia's greatest treasures.
As a survivor of two of the 20th century's worst genocides, the Sarajevo Haggadah has become a kind of icon of fin de siècle Sarajevo, when Christians, Moslems, and Jews lived in peace, a memory romanticized in the Geraldine Brooks best-selling novel about the Haggadah, People of the Book. It has also become the most frequently reproduced medieval Jewish illustrated manuscript. After the original publication in the 1890s, no fewer than four additional facsimiles have appeared, some of them in multiple printings. And now, the best facsimile of all has appeared, published under the auspices of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina and produced with state-of-the-art digital technology that makes every previous edition literally pale in comparison. The Haggadah's extraordinary coloring now emerges in all its rich glow, the detailed decoration is fully restored, and the gold leaf in the initial panels actually shines.
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