A Bosnian Museum Exploits a Medieval Haggadah to Make the Jews Pay for Their Sins

The richly illustrated Sarajevo Haggadah is one of the greatest and most famous illustrated manuscripts of the Jewish Middle Ages. The story of its origins and preservation remains shrouded in mystery, but most likely it was produced in Barcelona or thereabouts around 1350 and brought by Jews fleeing the 1492 expulsion from Spain to Italy and then to the Balkans—both of which were major destinations for the refugees of Sepharad. In 1894, a Jew sold it to Sarajevo’s national museum. The manuscript’s survival in World War II is a story unto itself, as was its survival of the Balkan wars of the 1990s.