The Sarajevo Haggadah is a magnificent little book. Measuring about six and a half by nine inches, its pages feature the traditional Hebrew text of the Passover seder with vivid, shimmering illuminations in bold colours—lapis blues, malachite greens and others. Several of the illuminations show pictures of Jewish life in medieval Spain and have led scholars to conclude that it was created sometime during the mid-1300s, a century before printing.
Nobody knows for certain the full chain of its provenance, but we do know that it was in Venice by 1609, and that the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina purchased it from a family named Kohen in 1894. There are unconfirmed reports that, on June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was on his way to view the Haggadah when he was assassinated in an act of violence that sparked the beginning of the First World War.
The museum is currently planning to publish a book about the Haggadah, Sarajevo Haggadah – Art and History. On Aug. 1, it issued a statement announcing that all proceeds from the book, as well as income from tickets to see the Haggadah itself, will be donated “for helping Palestine.” The statement said that the museum hoped to provide “support to the people of Palestine who suffer systematic, cold-blooded terror, directly by the state of Israel, and indirectly by all those who support and/or justify it in its shameless actions.”
The rhetoric oozes with anti-Israel and arguably antisemitic vitriol. Such rhetoric, while objectionable in any context, is particularly unfortunate because of the role that one Muslim scholar—a Bosnian Muslim hero—played in the story of the Sarajevo Haggadah.
It’s common knowledge that, during their murderous reign, the Nazis burned Jewish books. What many people don’t know, however, is that most of the Nazi book burnings happened during a period of about three weeks, in May 1933, right at the beginning of Hitler’s reign.
Afterward, the Nazi government made a systematic effort to loot and collect as many Jewish books possible. They pillaged millions of Jewish books—sacred literature, works of history, children’s books, trashy novels and more.
A group of Nazi scholars were particularly eager to get their hands on antiquarian Jewish books, and during the German occupation of Yugoslavia, one of them, General Johann Fortner, took special interest in the Sarajevo Haggadah. Early that year, Fortner visited the museum and asked to see its director. He wanted that Haggadah.
There was, however, a problem. The museum’s director was a Croatian archaeologist who didn’t speak German, and Fortner didn’t speak Serbo-Croatian. To interpret, the director called upon the museum’s librarian, a quiet, unassuming man named Dervis Korkut. The 54-year-old Korkut, a Muslim, was proficient in 10 languages, and had written on a wide variety of topics. Early in the war, one of his articles was entitled “Antisemitism is Foreign to the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
The three men sat down in the director’s office, and, after some opening pleasantries, Fortner got right to the point.
“And now,” he said, “please give me the Haggadah.”
“But General,” the director responded through Korkut’s translation, “one of your officers came here already and demanded the Haggadah. Of course, I gave it to him.”
Fortner was incredulous. “What officer?” he retorted.
“I did not think it was my place to require a name.”
As the frustrated Fortner departed, the director and Korkut may have had to suppress mischievous smiles. What they knew—and Fortner didn’t—was that during the entire conversation they had just had with the Nazi official, the famous Sarajevo Haggadah had been in Dervis Korkut’s pants.
Korkut and the director had devised the ruse just moments before Fortner arrived that day. Knowing he was coming, Korkut pleaded with the director for permission to hide the Haggadah. The director warned Korkut that doing so would be very dangerous, but Korkut was adamant. The two men hurried to the basement, opened the safe, removed the Haggadah, and Korkut carefully slipped it under the waistband of his pants and buttoned up his jacket to conceal it just as the Nazi official arrived.
As it turns out the Sarajevo Haggadah wasn’t the only thing that Devis Korkut concealed from the Nazis. Several weeks after hiding the Haggadah, the custodian of a nearby building introduced Korkut to a Jewish woman named Mira Papo, who had just escaped an attack on a Communist partisan group she had joined in the nearby woods. Looking at this starving, bedraggled woman, Korkut didn’t even pause. He brought Mira Papo and her daughter home, introduced them to his wife, and sheltered them for four months until they could get to a safer place.
Dervis Korkut died in 1969, and it wasn’t for another 30 years that the world learned the heroism he demonstrated in saving the life of Mira Papo and her daughter. In 1999, the Israeli government named Dervis and Servet Korkut as “Righteous Among the Nations,” and inscribed their names in the Garden of the Righteous at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem.
And it is this medieval, illuminated Jewish book—rescued by a Muslim scholar who heroically committed himself to the preservation of Jewish life and culture—that the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina is now exploiting in an attempt to attack the Jewish state. I can’t help but think that, from somewhere on high, Dervis Korkut weeps as he sees the lasting conflict and violence between these two groups to which he was so deeply committed.
Using the Sarajevo Haggadah to attack the Jewish state—indeed, to attack any religious, cultural, or national group—is a betrayal of Korkut’s heroic legacy. Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if it could have been otherwise? If this centuries-old Jewish treasure could continue to affirm the best of human values, as it did with Korkut, rather than the ugliness of the recent declaration by its current owners?
What if the museum had announced not that it would use the proceeds of the Haggadah to attack the “cold-blooded terror” of Israel, but rather that it would provide humanitarian aid to innocent victims of the conflict? In fact, there is a passage in the Haggadah that proclaims, “Let all who are hungry come and eat.” What if the proceeds of that book were used to provide food and medicine to hungry Gazan civilians? Many Jews would certainly support such an effort, even as Israeli hostages continue to languish in captivity and Israeli soldiers fall in battle during this horrible war.
Dervis Korkut protected an innocent victim of cruelty at great risk to his own life; he guarded both Jewish and Muslim cultural treasures, also at great risk. May the model he set be a model for us all. And may the book he saved from Nazi hands also help save us all from unnecessary suffering and conflict.
Rabbi Mark Glickman is the spiritual leader of Temple B’nai Tikvah in Calgary. He is also the author of Stolen Words: The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books (Jewish Publication Society, 2016).
