The Sarajevo Haggadah is an illuminated manuscript that contains the illustrated traditional text of the Passover Haggadah which accompanies the Passover Seder. It belongs to a group of Spanish-Provençal Sephardic Haggadahs, originating “somewhere in northern Spain”, most likely city of Barcelona, around 1350, and is one of the oldest of its kind in the world.
The Haggadah is owned by the state and kept in National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo. Its monetary value is undetermined, but a museum in Spain required that it be insured for $7 million before it could be transported to an exhibition there in 1992.
The Sarajevo Haggadah is inscribed a National Monument of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Commission to Preserve National Monuments of Bosnia and Herzegovina, on 17 January 2003, as movable cultural property. The Sarajevo Haggadah was submitted by Bosnia and Herzegovina for inclusion in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register and was included in 2017.
Description
The Sarajevo Haggadah is handwritten on the recto and verso in Hebrew, using square script typical for medieval Spain, on bleached calfskin vellum and illuminated with some gold. It opens with 34 pages of illustrations of key scenes in the Bible from creation through the death of Moses. Its pages are stained with wine, evidence that it was used at many Passover Seders. It was probably created as a wedding gift for a marriage between the two families whose coats of arms appear at the bottom of the opening page. The Golden Haggadah in the British Library is another medieval book from Catalonia, a few decades older.
History
The Sarajevo Haggadah has survived many close calls with destruction. Historians believe that it was taken out of the Iberian Peninsula by Jews who were expelled by the Alhambra Decree in 1492. Notes in the margins of the Haggadah indicate that it surfaced in Italy in the 16th century. It was sold to the National Museum in Sarajevo in 1894 by a man named Joseph Kohen.
[Keywords: Nataša Tabori, Dragoljub Zamurović, Jakob Finci]
Recensioner
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