THE SARAJEVO HAGGADAH BY RICHARD BERENGARTEN

THE PEOPLE OF THE BOOK

The Sarajevo Haggadah is a medieval Hebrew masterpiece, handwritten on bleached calfskin and illuminated in copper and gold. Written to accompany the Seder, the celebratory meal that opens the Passover festival, and originating in Spain around 1350, this book is believed to have been taken out of the Iberian Peninsula by Sephardic Jews on their way into exile, following their expulsion by Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon in 1492.

The volume found its way to Sarajevo, where there was a strong Sephardic community until it was all but wiped out by the Fascist Croatian Ustaše during the Second World War.

During the war, the book was carefully hidden. A facsimile edition was co-published in Sarajevo and Belgrade in 1983, edited by the Serbian-Jewish Hebraic scholar Eugen Verber, who gave me a copy in 1989. Following the Dayton Accord of 1995, which effectively ended the three-year-long Bosnian war, Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Serbs wrangled over where the Haggadah should be housed. In 1998, the Bosnian Serbs argued that it should be exhibited for one third of each year in Banja Luka, the capital of Republika Srpska.

In 1998, The then-leader of the Sarajevo Jewish Community, Jakob Finci,  comments: “The Haggadah is proof of the multi-ethnicity of Bosnia. It is a testament that even in [the] worse times, other people’s values were not destroyed.” Finci would have run as a candidate for the Presidency of Bosnia and Hercegovina had it not been for a discriminatory flaw in the post-war constitution that was overlooked in the Dayton Accord. This didn’t allow Jews to be considered as eligible – a major American and NATO-sponsored gaffe, considering that the aim of the Accord was to ensure inter-ethnic and inter-religious tolerance.