The Sarajevo Hagaddah: Held Hostage in a Crumbling and Shuttered Museum

An exquisite 14th-century illuminated manuscript, one of few artifacts to have survived the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, is in danger. In a story not unlike that of many Sephardi families, the Haggadah migrated first to Venice and then to Sarajevo, then the capital of the Ottoman province of Bosnia and home to a thriving Jewish community. The manuscript managed to survive both the Holocaust and the fierce fighting in Bosnia in the 1990s. But today the ongoing tensions between Bosnia’s central government and its autonomous Serbian Republic are holding it captive: