The Book That Kept Arriving

The Haggadah is the book you read at the Passover table. Its subject is departure - the leaving of Egypt, the going-out, the long road from slavery toward somewhere that might eventually be called a home. That the most celebrated Haggadah in the world has spent the last six hundred years in almost perpetual motion, crossing from Spain to Italy to the Balkans, hiding in caves and bank vaults, surviving an inquisitor's inspection and a Nazi general's eye and a siege measured in years, is either a very good joke or a very precise illustration of what the Haggadah actually says. Possibly both.

It was made in Barcelona, around 1350. The craftsmen who made it - the scribe who lettered the text in a fine Sephardic hand, the illuminator who painted sixty-nine miniatures across thirty-four illuminated folios of biblical scenes in gold leaf and lapis lazuli - were working at the height of a culture that had been flourishing in Iberia for three hundred years. The Jewish communities of Catalonia and Castile were, at that moment, among the most intellectually productive in the world: physicians, poets, philosophers, astronomers, mapmakers, translators. The Haggadah shows it. The miniatures are painted in the full Gothic style of fourteenth-century Catalonia, except that the figures in them are Jewish and the story is the Exodus, and there are no apologies for the combination.

The book is painted on calfskin vellum, bound between wooden boards - later given leather covers - and runs to about 142 pages. The miniatures are not illustrations of the Haggadah text; they are illustrations of the whole arc of Jewish scripture, from Creation to the Exodus, set before the Passover readings as a kind of graphic overture. Whoever commissioned it wanted something more than a prayer book. They wanted an argument, made in beauty, for the coherence of the tribe's story from the beginning to the table at which you're sitting right now.

What leaving looks like

The 1492 expulsion from Spain is one of the defining events in the tribe's long story - the moment when a community that had been part of the Iberian peninsula for at least a thousand years was given four months to leave or convert, and the majority left. They went to the Ottoman Empire, to North Africa, to Italy, to the eastern Mediterranean. They took what they could carry. The Haggadah was apparently portable enough.

How it got from Spain to Italy is not precisely known. The community of Spanish Jews who settled in Venice - and there were many, practising the same Sephardic rite they'd observed in Catalonia - is one plausible route. What is known is that by 1609 the book was in Italy, and that year it received what may be its most startling annotation: a line of Latin written in the margin of the final page by a Catholic inquisitor named Giovanni Domenico Vistorini.

The Haggadah was subject to censorship as a matter of course. Church officials examined Jewish texts in the Counter-Reformation period, looking for passages that might be construed as offensive to Christianity. Many books were confiscated. Many were burned. Vistorini examined this one and wrote his verdict: Revisto per mi - surveyed by me - and added the formal finding that would allow it to remain in Jewish hands. "This Jewish book does not contain anything against the Holy Church."

That sentence, written by an inquisitor in 1609, saved the book. There is no comfortable word for the institution he represented, and none is offered here. What can be said without sentimentality is that he looked at the Haggadah and told the truth about it, and the book survived because he did. The ink of his inscription is still visible on the final page, a permanent record of the day a censor became a custodian.

150 crowns and a mountain mosque

How the Haggadah reached Sarajevo from Italy is another of the gaps the book prefers to keep. By the time it surfaces again clearly it is 1894, in the possession of a Sephardic family named Koen - descendants, most likely, of the same community that had carried Spanish traditions and the Spanish-inflected Ladino language from Iberia to the Balkans across four centuries. They sold it to the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina for 150 crowns. The museum published it, studied it, understood what it had.

Forty-seven years later, the Germans came.

In April 1941 the Axis powers occupied Yugoslavia, and Sarajevo fell within days. In 1942 a German general arrived at the museum asking for the Haggadah. The curator of manuscripts at the time was Derviš Korkut - a Bosnian Muslim scholar, a man who by all accounts understood books the way some people understand music: as something that has a life of its own and a claim on you that outweighs convenience. He told the general that the Haggadah had already been taken elsewhere for safekeeping. This was, at the time he said it, not yet true. He then made it true.

Korkut smuggled the Haggadah out of Sarajevo and carried it to a village on the slopes of Mount Bjelašnica, where a local imam - whose name has never been established, and who apparently preferred it that way - hid it among the Qurans and other Islamic texts in his mosque until the war ended. The Passover book about departure and exile rested in a mountain mosque, wrapped in the company of another Abrahamic scripture, for the duration of the occupation. It was not the first time the book had been looked after by hands outside the tribe, and it would not be the last.

Korkut was recognised as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 1994, a quarter-century after his death. He had also, during the same years, hidden a young Jewish woman, Mira Papo, in his family's home. He was, in other words, not a man who saved things by accident. He saw what the situation required and he did it, and the Haggadah came back to Sarajevo when the occupation ended.

What a Passover book is for

The Haggadah is not a passive text. It's a manual for a performance - for the Seder, the meal-as-ceremony at which the tribe re-enacts the departure from Egypt every spring, in every generation, in every country where Jews have sat down together. The central instruction of the Seder is not simply to remember the Exodus but to inhabit it: "In every generation a person is obligated to see themselves as if they personally left Egypt." The ceremony requires the pretence of presence. You were there. You are leaving. You don't know yet where you're going.

The Sarajevo Haggadah has been the occasion for that act of imagination in Barcelona, probably in Venice, somewhere along the Adriatic coast, in Sarajevo across six centuries. It has been in the hands of a Catalan illuminator painting lapis lazuli miniatures, a Spanish family packing to leave, an Italian censor deciding what stays and what doesn't, a Sephardic family selling it for 150 crowns, a Muslim curator choosing personal risk over institutional compliance, an imam choosing a Passover book over a quiet life, an archaeologist choosing a book over his own safety. None of these people were the book's original intended audience. All of them kept it.

It sits now in the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Sarajevo, in a case built for it. The miniatures are as vivid as they were in 1350. The figures in them wear their medieval pointed hats and walk toward the sea, and the sea is opening, and the story is going where it always goes: through, and out the other side, and on.