Inbunden | Engelska & Hebreiska | 2008

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 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.

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.