Emperor Franz Joseph’s nephew, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Princess Sophia were on their way to open the State Museum in its new premises and view the Sarajevo Haggadah when they were assassinated on June 28, 1914, sparking the beginning of World War I, a month later. According to some scholars, the heir to the Hapsburg throne may have intended to pay homage to Sarajevo’s coveted treasure, the magnificent gold and copper illuminated Haggadah, as a conciliatory and strategic gesture.
The fourteenth century Sarajevo Haggadah which is actually a misnomer because it originated in what is today, Barcelona, Spain, is considered the most beautiful illuminated Jewish manuscript in existence. When a Madrid museum requested to borrow it to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1992, it was appraised by an insurance company for $7 million dollars. The premium was too expensive and the plans to have it exhibited in Madrid fell through.
Handwritten on vellum (bleached calfskin) the prized medieval codex opens with 34 pages containing miniatures and illustrations depicting scenes from the creation of the world, the Tower of Bavel, Noah’s Ark, our forefathers Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov, the shevatim and Yoseph, the bondage in Egypt, the birth of Moshe Rabbeinu, through the exodus from Egypt and finally the death of Moshe Rabbeinu. The backs of each of the illuminated pages were left blank by the artist in order to prevent the bleeding of its vivid bright blue, yellow, red and green colors. The prized Haggadah contains 142 folios which dimensions are 22 x 16 centimeters.
The integration of Midrashic motifs in the illustrations demonstrate that the artist was probably Jewish. More than 25% of the scenes depict the story of Yoseph Hatzaddik which is similarly prominent in other Catalonian Haggadahs.
The page on which the verses of “Ha Lachma Anya” appear clue us in to the origin of this Haggadah. A shield at the top of the page featuring red and gold vertical stripes was the symbol for Barcelona in what was then the kingdom of Aragon. It is believed that based on the clothes, utensils and ornamental elements featured on its pages, the Haggadah was commissioned by a wealthy Spanish Jewish family sometime in the middle of the fourteenth century.
The late Cecil Roth, prominent Oxford historian and editor of the Encyclopedia Judaica whose “The Sarajevo Haggadah and its Significance in Art History” was published in 1963, sees the bird’s wing on the aforementioned page as representing the Sanz family while the rosette, symbolic of the Aragonese House, demonstrates the family’s probably close connection to this ruling family. Some scholars believe it may have been a wedding gift to a Chassan and Kallah. Very fascinating is the fact that the earth is depicted as round on the very first illustrated page, 200 years before Gallileo was tried by the Roman Inquisition for his Copernican views.
The history of this Haggadah is a mystery. It probably left Spain when the Jews were expelled in 1492. On one of the fly leaves is a note of sale dated August 25th, 1510, which shows it surfaced in Italy. The names of the buyer and seller were scratched out and painted over with white paint.
Evidence of pages being turned and stains from drops of wine attest to its usage. At the end of the Haggadah there is a Latin inscription that bears witness to the fact that a Catholic priest by the name of Giovanni Domenico Vistorini inspected the Haggadah in 1609. His inscription Revisto per mi, (inspected by me) tells us that it escaped being burned by the church during the Pope’s inquisition and public burning of Jewish books.
Sarajevo became known as the Jerusalem of Europe because Christian, Muslims and Jews who fled persecution lived there peacefully in close proximity to each other. It was, until recently in the 20th century, the only major European city to have a synagogue, mosque, and Catholic and Orthodox churches within the same neighborhood. It was to there the owner of the Haggadah seems to have fled sometime before or during the nineteenth centry.
In 1894 a child whose last name was Cohen came to the Sarajevo Jewish communal cheder carrying the Haggadah with him. His father had recently passed away and the family was in dire straits and needed to sell it to support itself. The National Museum in Sarajevo eventually acquired the Haggadah that year for 150 crowns or the equivalent of what was then $10.000. The new acquistion was initially sent to Vienna, the seat of the Hapsburg dynasty where a critical study assessed the Haggadah’s contribution to art history. It was printed for the first time in 1898 containing essays on it by Heinrich Muller, a Jewish liturgical expert and Julius ven Schlosser, a non-Jewish art historian. David Kaufmann, the Hungarian scholar and collector contributed an important excursus to it on Medieval Jewish illuminated mansucripts. During this printing, the manuscripts was first called the “Sarajevo Haggadah.” The publication immediately made a profound impression in the world of scholarship. The illustrations were produced and reproduced in various reference works and cited all over the world.
Unfortunately an inept conservator in Vienna had discarded its binding and replaced it with a cheap cardboard cover. We don’t know what the original cover looked like but we can imagine it was surely as magnificent as the pages inside.
Once the study had been completed in the Hapsburg capital, the Haggadah was returned to the National Museum of Sarajevo where it remained until World War II. The Haggadah till that time had never been displayed in public, but kept locked in a box. Only a select few were privy to gaze at its magnficent illuminations from time to time.
Geraldine Brooks, a pulitzer prize winning author who served as a correspondent for the Wall Street journal during the Bosnian War, describes what happened to the Haggadah during World War II in her fascinating article in the Dec. 9, 2007 issue of the New Yorker entitled, “The Book of Exodus.” (Her factual report is not to be confused with her novel, a work of fiction called “The People of the Book,” in which she spins a tale out of the Haggadah’s history, telling the story from the perspective of a rare book expert hired to analyze and restore the Haggadah after the Bosnian war.)
In her New Yorker article Brooks discusses Hitler’s nascent plan for a “Museum of an Extinct Race.” The best of Europe’s Judaica was being amassed under the authority of Alfred Rosenberg, the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. This collection was planned to facilitate (Jundeforschung ohne Juden) Jewish Studies without Jews.
The renown Haggadah had certainly elicited the interest of the Nazis and when German troops entered Sarajevo in 1941 while the city was part of the Independent State of Croatia, their intention was to take the famous valuable Haggadah.
The director of the Sarajevo Museum at the time was a Croat by the name of Jozo Petricevic. He did not speak German and requested that the Museums’s chief librarian, an Islamic scholar named Dervis Korkut, act as translator when he was informed a German General by the name of Hans Fortner was soon coming to the museum. Korkut was knowledgeable in ten languages and was also an author; among his writings was a book in Serbo-Croatian on the history and architecture of his birthplace, Travnik, the old Ottoman capital of Bosnia.
Korkut pleaded with the director that he be given the Haggadah to hide. The two went down to the basement where Petricevic opened the safe which combination only he knew and took the Haggadah and handed it to Korkut. Korkut lifeted his coat and tucked the six by nine inch Haggadah in the waistband of his trousers and smoothed his jacket to make sure there were no bulges revealing the treasure. They went upstairs to face the general. Fortner was greatly feared in Sarajevo. He oversaw a Croatian Fascist regimen known as the Black Legion as well as served as a general of his own army division. The Black Legion massacred Serbs and Jews and and tortured and murdered sympathizers of the partisan resistance.
General Fortner demanded of Petricevic that he immediately be given the country’s treasure.
Thinking quickly, Petricevic denied the museum had it anymore.
“One of your colonels came yesterday and took it from us.”
“What was the name of the colonel?”, boomed Fortner angrily.
Petricevic answered that he had not dared to ask his name.
Fortner had the museum searched. Fortunately it was not found. The Germans nevertheless did confiscate the Pinkas, the historical annals of the Sephardic community of Sarajevo, spanning a period of several centuries as well as the Pinkas of the community of Dubrovnik.
Fortner was hung after the war in Belgrade after being tried for his war crimes in a Yugoslavian court.
Incidentally, Professor Marko Oreskovic, director of the National Library in Zagreb during the period of 1944-1945, was able to save valuable books which were brought to him for safekeeping. He risked his life, by refusing to allow the Germans to install their anit-aircraft guns on the roof of the library, since he feared that the library would be bombed by the Allies.
Stories abound concerning the hiding place of the Haggadah during World War II. One such story claims that a Muslim hid it under a Mosque in a village at the foot of Mount Bjelasnica. Another tale attributes its hiding place to the earth under a fruit tree.
Geraldine Brooks discovered that the widow of Dervis Korkut was still alive. She went to see her and personally ask her where her husband had hidden the Haggadah. Servet was only sixteen in 1940 when she married Dervis Korkut, 37 years her senior. They had been married less than a year when he came home from the museum with the Haggadah tucked under his jacket.
Servet Korkut revealed to Geraldine that her late husband had driven with the Haggadah to his friend who was an imam in a mosque in a remote village near the area of Trescavica. It was hidden among the Korans in the mosque until after the war when it was returned to the museum. Servet also told Geraldine about a Jewish nineteen year old girl by the name of Mira Papo that they had saved during the war. A year after Mira died in 1998, a letter that she had written to Yad Vashem about the Korkuts enabled Mira to repay her saviors when during the 1999 Kosova war, Israel spirited out Korkuts daughter’s family to Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was at the airport to welcome them.
In her memoir, “Cecil Roth, Historian Without Tears,” Cecil Roth’s widow Irene writes that the Yugoslav government of Josip Tito invited her husband to edit for reproduction the Sarajevo Haggadah and they flew to Sarajevo in 1959 to see it for the first time. She relates that Cecil was later invited to Belgrade to lecture before the Academy of Sciences. A little man who was sitting in the corner of the room and was the president of the academy turned out to be the last survivor of the group which had conspired with Gavrilo Princip to assassinate Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
During the breakup of Yugoslavia (1992-1995), when Sarajevo was under Serbian siege, the National Museum was bombed.
Andras Riedlemayer, a Harvard expert on the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans contributed an article to the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin of 1995 entitled “Erasing the Past: The Destruction of Archives and Libraries in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In it he describes how the National Museum had been badly hit. “Shells crashed through the roof and the skylights and all of its 300 windows have been shot out, as have the walls of several galleries. …. Dr. Rizo Sijari, the Museum’s director, was killed by a grenade blast on December 10, 1993 while trying to arrange for plastic sheeting from UN relief agencies to cover some of the holes in the building.”
Fortunately, just a few days earlier, Dr. Enver Imamovic, the director of the Museum together with several policemen and guards had the Haggadah transferred to the vault of the National Bank. But the public was not aware of this and several newspapers reported that it was believed the Serbs sold the Haggadah to buy arms or that the Mossad had taken it away for safe keeping.
The rumors were quelled when U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman announced that he would come to Sarajevo to celebrate Passover if the Haggadah were on the table.
President Izetbegović and Prime Minister Silajdžić accepted Lieberman’s offer and the Haggadah was brought to the Jewish Community building for Passover in 1995 under extremely tight security. The event was reported by news agencies around the world and a number of journalists were dispatched to Sarajevo especially for the occasion. It was breaking news on CNN, though Senator Lieberman did not make it to Sarajevo because of the siege and the closing of the airport.
Nevertheless the Sarajevo Haggadah was presented to the public. Twelve million American Viewers watched ABC Night Line when a broadcast was dedicated to the Sarajevo Haggadah that year.
On December 14 1995, the Dayton peace agreement between Yugoslav President Milosevic, Croatian President Tudjman and the President of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Izetbetgoiv left seven cultural institutions without a guardian and devoid of any funding for the preservations of Bosnia’s National Heritage. At the end of the conflict, Bosnia was split along ethnic lines into two semi-autonomous parts linked by a weak central government. This central government has no ministry of culture and no obligation to provide funding for the institutions that are the custodians of the country’s national heritage, including precious medieval manuscripts, religious relicts, and natural history artifacts.
The Bosnian Serbs, oppose giving the central government control over the cultural sites, with their leaders often insisting that Bosnia is an artificial state and that each of the country’s ethnic groups has its own heritage.
Bosniaks, insist that safeguarding the shared history of the Bosnian people is one way to keep the country unified instead of permanently splitting it the way many Bosnian Serbs would want..
During the past few years the national institutions have been partially financed through insufficient grants from different layers of government, allowing the buildings to say open while cutting down on staff and operational costs came from the reserves of the central budget.
After the October 2010 general elections, the six winning parties took nearly 15 months to reach an agreement on the formation of the new central government, leaving power in the hands of an outgoing cabinet that failed to pass a budget. No funds have been provided, for the national cultural institutions including the National Museum. A number of employees worked at the Museum for months without getting paid. But when there was no money to pay for the utilities of the building housing the Haggadah, the doors were closed.
In 2001 the Sarjevo Haggadah had been restored through a special campaign financed by the United Nations and the Bosnian Jewish community. It went on what was supposed to be permanent display at the museum in December 2002. Now that the museum is closed, the future of the Haggadah is in peril.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan offered to house and exhibit the Haggadah for three years.
Liljano Sevo, a member of Bosnia’s Commission on National Monuments announced that the unresolved status of the museum was the reason it had to turn the request down. She admitted that the Metropolitan Museum had offered optimum security and conditions for the exhibition of the Sarajevo treasure.
The president of the Jewish community of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Jakob Finci expressed his disappointment with the decision. “It could have been seen by millions of people,” he stated.
The Sarajevo Haggadah has traveled through a tumultuous 650 year journey so far. Hopefully, when the status of the museum becomes resolved, the Sarajevo Haggadah will continue to delight and inspire Jews and non-Jews from around the world.