A Passover Haggadah illuminated in Barcelona around 1350 — thirty-four miniatures of the biblical story in a Jewish book — treasured, hidden from Nazis and from war, and kept in Sarajevo as the city's emblem of itself.
Tagged: Manuscript Illumination Museum Medieval Liturgical Pedagogical Iconic Extant Haggadah Hebrew Manuscripts Jewish
Why It Stands Here
The Haggadah is the Jewish profile's proof in one object: a lavishly figural book, made for the seder table, in a tradition whose commandment is so often misread as a ban on pictures. Its miniatures paint creation, Exodus, and the coming of the Messiah in the Gothic manner of Christian Spain — by Jewish patrons, for Jewish use, without recorded anxiety.
The manuscript was written and illuminated in Barcelona around 1350, probably as a wedding gift; its wine-stained pages record centuries of seders. It crossed Europe with the exiles of 1492, surfaced in Italy, and was sold to the National Museum in Sarajevo in 1894. In 1942 the museum's librarian, Derviš Korkut, hid it from the Gestapo in a mosque library; in the 1990s it survived the siege of Sarajevo in a bank vault. Muslim librarians twice saved the Jewish book, and Sarajevo tells the story as its own.
Liturgically it is a working Haggadah, its text the order of the Passover meal; artistically it is among the supreme Hebrew manuscripts, its full-page miniatures in tempera and gold on bleached calfskin. It is displayed in the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina under permanent conservation conditions.
References
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