By the Book

by Ramona Koval

  The book made its way across the Adriatic Sea to Split, to Dubrovnik and finally to Sarajevo, possibly in the luggage of Jewish merchants in the eighteenth century.

  In 1894 a young man from the Cohen family in Sarajevo brought the book to his school to sell it, as his family was destitute after his father’s death. Versions of this story begin to have a touch of folklore about them.

  The codex was then bought for a few dozen florins by the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina and it was sent to Vienna for conservation. It was duly returned after two years. From then on it would be called the Sarajevo Haggadah, and was well known to scholars and collectors of rare manuscripts. Archivists say that it is the seminal Jewish codex of the Middle Ages. Well before the siege of Sarajevo it was a symbol of the city’s survival and rejuvenation, as iconic as the bridge where Gavrilo Princip killed Archduke Ferdinand, thereby starting World War One, and the buildings that were erected for the 1984 Winter Olympics.

  My journey on the trail of this medieval codex began with a flight from Berlin to Munich and on to Sarajevo. We tacked over the Alps and then down into valleys where scattered Bosnian mountain villages hugged the ridges. It was autumn but the hills around Sarajevo were mostly bare. During the siege of this town, just an hour away from Germany’s richest city, which started in 1992, the trees had been cut down for firewood. As we prepared for landing we swept over large cemeteries that seemed too big for the place. The Muslim graves, clearly visible from the air, were marked with white mileposts rather than flat upright headstones. Chunks of the hills were simply blown away.

  Jaque and his driver picked me up from the airport, and we drove into the city, past the bombarded large apartment blocks that had been built for the Olympics. Each window frame was charred, and sometimes the top of a building was sheared off. In some places you could see an attempt at renewal but the economy was still in the doldrums six years after the war had ended.

  Here, and throughout Bosnia, libraries, archives, museums and cultural institutions had been targeted for destruction to remove any traces of evidence that people of different ethnic and religious groups had for generations lived and worked together.

  On 25 August 1992 the century-old library of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina was shelled and burned. According to eyewitnesses braving the hail of sniper fire from Serbian nationalist positions across the river, librarians and other volunteers formed a human chain to pass books out of the burning building. Aida Buturovic, a librarian in the exchange section, was shot to death by a sniper while attempting to rescue books from the flames. Surviving staff members of the library—Serbs, Croats, Muslims and Jews—continued with the rescue and ten per cent of its collection was saved.

  Three months earlier, Sarajevo’s Oriental Institute—home to the largest collection of Islamic and Jewish manuscripts and Ottoman documents in south-eastern Europe—was shelled with phosphorous grenades and burned. A total of 5263 bound manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and Aljamiado (a Bosnian Slavic language written in Arabic script) were destroyed, along with 7000 Ottoman documents, primary source material for five centuries of Bosnian history, a collection of nineteenth-century cathedral registers and 200,000 other documents of the Ottoman era.

  In each case the library and the Oriental Institute alone were targeted, leaving buildings on either side standing. Eyewitnesses described a fine ash like snow falling over the city.

  The Sarajevo Haggadah escaped this bombardment. It was rescued by a Muslim, Dr Enver Imamovic, the director of the museum. It had reportedly been stored in an old Viennese safe, which saved it from incineration.

  By the time I got to the city in 2001, the building where the Sarajevo Haggadah was housed before the 1992 war was still a ruin. The windows were covered with planks of wood. On another site, the philosophy department of Sarajevo University had been heavily shelled. A tall building next door to the university stood silent—every window discharged, every room bared to its concrete roots by searing fires.

  This was on the main boulevard, formerly known as Ulica Zmaja od Bosne or ‘Dragon of Bosnia Street’, which had earned a new name: Sniper’s Alley. Further down the street, walking through the historic part of Sarajevo, it was much like many other old East European towns, mostly rundown low-rise buildings. The minarets on the mosques were the highest structures. Side by side or around the corner were synagogues and churches, both Catholic and Orthodox. A tap with free-flowing spring water, from the hills that surround the city, runs at the centre of the old market, and I drank from it with my cupped hands. Modern Muslim women passed, with beautiful faces and elegant headscarves and kohl around their eyes.

  Out-of-work men, some playing backgammon, hung around the main square and the little streets leading off it. I saw people with vacant eyes, madmen obsessively crossing themselves, and one fellow rushing through the market clutching his hand to his heart. I wondered what he had seen or done. Men missing limbs were pushed by their families in broken wheelchairs.

  The roofs in the streets of jewellery makers and samovar sellers and carpet weavers were crumbling. I walked down narrow alleyways with hardly enough room for two people to pass. These opened into yet another square where tables and chairs filled every available space and were packed with people drinking coffee under umbrellas, talking, talking, talking. Sarajevo may have been traumatised by war but it was pulsing with life.

  There were rarely any road signs to tell you where to park or how to navigate. The house-numbering system was eccentric, subject to the vicissitudes of previous bouts of shelling and target practice. In the evenings you could hear the muezzin calling people to prayer from the raised minarets, with the aid of a tinny loudspeaker.

  I met Dr Jakob Finci, president of Sarajevo’s 700-person strong Jewish community, and the head of La Benevolencija, the community’s educational, cultural and philanthropic organisation. He is now Bosnia’s ambassador to Switzerland. He told me the history of Jews in Bosnia dated to 1530 when the first Jewish family settled there. Bosnia was a province of the Ottoman Empire, which treated Jews like all other non-Muslims of the time—no ghetto and no special persecution save for the prohibition against Jews owning land.

  Life was relatively good for Jews in Sarajevo until the Nazi invasion in 1941, when the pro-fascist Croatian government facilitated the removal and murder of Jews in local slaughters and in more remote concentration camps. Finci’s own parents were sent to the Italian camp in which he was born at the end of the war. He is the only Finci in the last three hundred and fifty years not to have been born in Sarajevo. Eighty per cent of the community’s twelve thousand members were murdered.

  In 1941 German soldiers and local gangs destroyed the Old Jewish Temple, the sacred objects in it, and a large library collection including the archive of the Sarajevo Jewish community.

  Finci is passionate about the Haggadah story. ‘I think that the story that the Haggadah was hidden in the library was a realistic one,’ he told me. ‘But it’s not romantic enough and being a romantic I would like to think it was hidden somewhere in the mountains near Sarajevo and that it was saved yet again.’

  Kemal Bakarsic was, from 1986 to 1993, chief librarian of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He was also custodian of the Sarajevo Haggadah. Once a year he would check the condition of the codex, which was kept in a vault at the library, but never exhibited. Facsimile versions, like mine, were available to scholars and others.

  By the time I was there, he was teaching bibliography at the University of Sarajevo and I went to visit him. I climbed several flights of stairs through clouds of thick cigarette smoke. It seemed that every young person smoked, and I could see the need for calming of nerves. Why think of emphysema and cancer when so recently there was no thought of a future at all?

  Bakarsic’s office was full of paper and books and the results of his hobby of making jigsaw puzzles from Escher prints, an enterprise that seemed tailor-made to drive one to madness. He told me he w
as still obsessed with the Haggadah. He described the people who are attracted to it as seekers, retrievers and keepers. He’s a keeper. Seekers are always inventing ideas and trying to find out what has happened. They are gossips and narrators searching for the story. Retrievers are convinced that the seekers have failed in their quest.

  This particular codex has dozens of stories surrounding it: several about how it came to Bosnia, three about how it was sold to the national museum, five versions about what happened to it during World War Two and ten new stories for the period between 1992 and 1995.

  The margin note in the codex dated 1609 showing that the book was passed by the customs office in Rome is the only thing known about it until it was sold in 1894 for 150 golden crowns to the museum. This gap of almost three centuries is filled with stories.

  Bakarsic said that the first story, which he calls a legend, is about a young Jew from Bosnia, a student in Padua, who fell in love with a beautiful girl and received the Haggadah codex as his wedding present.

  The second legend is of a Jewish merchant from Sarajevo who had saved his Italian companion from a bad business deal in Florence and received the Haggadah as reward.

  The private nature of the Passover feasts at which Haggadahs are used adds to the difficulty of knowing exactly how this Haggadah arrived in Sarajevo, and what happened to it before the museum bought it at the end of the nineteenth century.

  Bakarsic told me that the rumours about the codex in World War Two have their roots in Bosnian folk tradition. The basic story is that in 1941, shortly after occupation, a German officer came to the museum and demanded from the director the extradition of the Haggadah. The director explained that another officer had asked for and received the codex just half an hour earlier. The director then smuggled the manuscript to a village in the hills surrounding the city, where it was hidden under a pear tree—or in other versions, an apple tree or even a cherry tree—or under the floorboards of a mosque in the care of a Muslim cleric. After the liberation of the city the Haggadah was returned to the museum.

  In Bosnia, Bakarsic told me, on the birth of a son, the father buries a barrel of his best wine or brandy under a tree. When the young man’s wedding day arrives, the barrel is dug up and the liquor drunk at the celebrations.

  After the war the director of the museum and the chief librarian were accused by the communists of being collaborators with the Nazis. Perhaps the story about the rescue of the Haggadah, Bakarsic said, was that they did not resist the Germans, but they did rescue this Jewish text and risked their lives doing so.

  In the most recent conflict, the Haggadah was once again the subject of gossip: it had been sold to buy arms for the Bosnian Muslim government. It had been damaged beyond repair. It was found in bushes after the Serb shelling of the museum. It was rescued from rising waters from the museum’s basement.

  None of the above was true. In fact the codex was taken from the museum vault and put into the National Bank vault for safe-keeping. Bakarsic himself was elevated to the position of deputy minister of Science, Culture, Education and Sport in the Bosnian government between 1993 and the 1995 Dayton Accords. He took the rumours of mistreatment of the Haggadah rather personally. He describes the 1995 Passover celebration Seder by the Jewish community as a ‘humiliation’ for the Bosnian government. President Izebekovic was pressured into showing the intact Haggadah at the event, to scotch the rumours that it had been traded for arms.

  Some weeks after our dinner in Berlin, I met Ambassador Jacques Paul Klein again in his office at the UN compound, a previously burned-out student residence at the university. The codex was of interest to him in his role coordinating UNESCO and UNICEF cultural matters on items that need to be preserved for international common interests.

  When he arrived in Sarajevo he discovered that the Haggadah was housed in a bank vault, probably deteriorating, and in need of further restoration. There was no money and people were quarrelling over the manuscript. It was difficult for him even to see it. The story of the life of this book was taking absurd turns.

  Klein was a big man with a booming voice and large hands that moved the air in front of him as he explained his vision for the Sarajevo Haggadah. A facsimile was open on the desk in front of him, and he thumbed through it to show me his favourite pages. He wondered at the illustrations showing the human form, which seemed to violate Talmudic law. Had its makers been influenced by Flemish and French prayer books and bibles of the same period?

  Klein wanted the museum to build a special airconditioned room for the codex. Bakarsic wasn’t sure. He was concerned about the fragile collection of butterflies and other insects, the herbarium and the lack of heating in the building. He wanted to see the museum reconstructed as a small version of the Smithsonian—full of people and ‘fancy exhibits’, and with money for the future development of the collections. ‘Including of course the protection of the Haggadah, which is the jewel in the crown.’

  In the meantime, Bakarsic was trying to re-create electronic replicas of many of the rare manuscripts that had been burnt. Some of them existed in photocopied form in other countries. He talked of a ‘suicidal mission’ to try to locate every scholar who ever went to the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo and made a copy or a transcript of any of the former manuscripts. He showed me a bad photocopy of an Arabic text that was in his desk drawer—in fact it has become the new original now that this manuscript has gone up in the smoke of Sarajevo.

  On my last day in Sarajevo I was due to see the famous codex. It was a misty autumn morning. By 11 a.m. the fog had hardly lifted over the surrounding hills, but it was going to be warm. I met Jakob Finci in the forecourt of the Union Bank. The manuscript was kept safe in its treasury.

  Finci seemed excited to be seeing the Haggadah again. We waited for the representatives of the Sarajevo Museum, the bank, and a couple of visiting curators from New York and Jerusalem, and were then escorted down the stairs, through a big blue security checkpoint, and then to the gleaming vault where locked boxes surrounded a round white table and a suite of blue office chairs. The key was found, and a box in the upper corner of the vault was opened. Inside it was a royal blue metal box, with the wax seals of the museum and the paper seals of the bank intact.

  They were broken by the security guards and the box was opened to reveal layers of white tissue paper. These were parted and an official wearing white cotton gloves lifted the book out of the box. It was about the size of a paperback novel. Its 1894 binding was worn and split but this was the only part of the Haggadah in any need of repair. It sat on the tissue paper and invited opening. The plates were surprisingly bright, glowing. The first is a picture of the creation of the world, the light and the dark. I was surprised to see the world depicted as a globe. The last plate depicts the death of Moses.

  Gold and copper illuminations, thirty-four full-page miniatures, blues, reds, greens, nearly seven hundred years old, radiated from the beautiful pages. And then the evidence of the book’s domestic life: wine stains, a father’s notes, children’s scribbles, on one page clearly a young child’s penmanship of the Hebrew letter Gimmel.

  The ink had been applied with a wide-nibbed implement, so that some letters showed a full-nibbed stroke at the top of the letter leading to thinner strokes at the bottom. There was a concentrated beauty in the illustrations and the square Hebrew letters. There was humour in the cheeky bird-like figures. How many lifetimes had it seen, how many close escapes from immolation?

  My visit was over in half an hour. I drove past the university, the UN compound, the torched high-rise flats to the airport. I waited with a group of English town-planners who had been at a conference in the shell of the city. The plane was late and they were going to miss their London connection. Eyebrows were raised.

  When I made my radio documentary about my visit, my last words were:

  As we took off from Sarajevo airport I thought of the city cut off from the world by the siege, of a nation divided by nationalistic passions, w
hich overflowed with cruelty and blood, of the libraries on fire, of books being used as fuel for heating and cooking, of people digging under pear and apple trees to find barrels of brandy or wine and of a priceless medieval codex with vibrant illustrations of strange and cheeky animals. And how the small mysterious book might build mutual understanding again, and bring people together, as they used to live for centuries.

  A naive hope? Of course. The peace agreement that was finally brokered divides the country into three communities—Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs. Only institutions that speak to each group’s national identity receive any financial support from government. Multiculturalism is almost dead. It’s reported that all of Bosnia’s cultural institutions are on the brink of termination. The staff of the museum haven’t been paid for months. There is no money for climate control and little for lighting.

  Kemal Bakarsic died of cancer in 2006. Both my cousin Jaque and Ambassador Klein have left the UN. Jakob Finci, who was elected to chair a national committee charged with setting up a truth-and-reconciliation commission and who was appointed head of the civil service agency, took the Bosnian government to court in Strasbourg for a breach of the European convention on human rights. The court ruled at the end of 2011 that no exclusion based ‘on a person’s ethnic origin is capable of being objectively justified in a contemporary democratic society’. But the result of the Dayton Accords, which brought an end to the war in 1995, was that membership in the upper house of parliament is reserved for equal numbers of Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs. Other groups, including Jews and the Roma, are effectively excluded. As Jakob Finci is not a member of any of the three communities, he is barred from public office in his country.

  Since my visit, a special vault has been built in the restored National Museum, equipped with bullet-proof glass to protect the Haggadah, which is now insured for more than a billion dollars. This small medieval codex, witness to seven hundred years of history and dispute, sits there now, awaiting the next part of its story.