It all began, as Geraldine Brooks remembers, in the bar of the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo, the war-ravaged capital of Bosnia.

Brooks, a foreign correspondent of the Wall Street Journal, was in Sarajevo to cover the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, a province in the old Yugoslavia embroiled in a civil war pitting Muslims against Christian Serbs.

“That’s when I first heard about it,” said Brooks, referring to the priceless Sarajevo Haggadah, the 14th-century manuscript made of bleached calfskin and illuminated in gold and copper.

Crafted in Barcelona, Spain, it is the world’s oldest Sephardi haggadah, a masterpiece of medieval Judaica with an astounding appraised value of $700 million.

Removed from the Iberian peninsula by Jews fleeing the Inquisition, the haggadah, judging by hand-written notes in its margins, was taken to Venice. There, a Catholic priest, for reasons best known to himself, saved it from the book burnings of papal intolerance.

The whereabouts of the wine-stained haggadah remains a mystery from that point onward, but in 1894, a man named Joseph Kohen sold it to the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzogovina in Sarajevo. By all accounts, it had been in the Kohen family’s possession for several generations.

In 1941, the German army marched into Sarajevo, in Ante Pavelic’s Nazi puppet state of Croatia. Synagogues were sacked and Jews were deported.

Amid these crushing events, the chief librarian of the National Museum, an anti-fascist Muslim scholar named Dervis Korkut, smuggled the haggadah out of Sarajevo under the very nose of a German general who had arrogantly come to claim it.

Having witnessed the destruction of Torah scrolls in Sarajevo, Korkut feared that the haggadah might meet an identical fate. He presumably did not know that the Nazis, bent on exterminating European Jewry in the Holocaust, were probably ghoulishly interested in showcasing it in a planned museum for the Jewish “extinct race.”

Korkut entrusted the haggadah to a Muslim cleric, who took it to a remote mountain village.

There, in an obscure mosque far from Sarajevo, it was hidden among Islamic textbooks, only to be returned to the National Museum in the wake of World War II.

For the past six years, the haggadah, a symbol of resurrection and hope in a nation that could dearly use both, has been on permanent display at the National Museum.

Shmoozing with colleagues that day in Sarajevo in the early 1990s, Brooks initially learned of its existence. Since the National Museum was pockmarked with the shrapnel of Serbian shelling, journalists wondered what had become of it.  

“There was a lot of gossip about it,” said Brooks.

According to one widely circulated rumour, the treasured volume had been sold by Muslim forces for the acquisition of arms. Still another account, which was far more implausible, suggested that it had been spirited out of the country by the Mossad, Israel’s external intelligence service.

In fact, the haggadah remained in Sarajevo throughout the fighting, having been deposited in a bank vault for safekeeping by a Muslim librarian.

“Not for the first time had it been saved by Muslim hands,” Brooks observed.

Its peregrinations fascinated Brooks, who has filed stories from the Middle East and Africa. “The few facts about it were so intriguing,” she said. “This little book had survived so many crises and found so many protectors.”

To Brooks, the topic seemed tailor-made for a book, but she applied herself to it in fits and starts.

Twelve years elapsed before she finally got down to the task of writing People of the Book, a novel published in February by Viking and distributed in Canada by Penguin.

In writing it, Brooks immersed herself in Jewish history and studied the techniques of bookbinding and illumination. In 2001, while researching it, she sat next to a book conservator who had been hired by the United Nations and the Bosnian Jewish community to restore it to its original condition. Brooks was impressed by its vivid illustrations and gleaming gold leaf, but saddened by its worn, discoloured binding.

People of the Book, which has elicited positive reviews, opens in 1996 as a young and upcoming Australian book conservator, Hanna Heath, is handed the job of a lifetime. She is asked to restore the Sarajevo Haggadah.

In leafing through its pages, she discovers a number of odd artifacts: an insect wing, a white hair and saltwater crystals. As she investigates the origins of these objects, the narrative moves backward to Sarajevo in the 1940s, Vienna in 1894, Venice in 1609, Tarragona in 1492 and Seville in 1480 before returning to the 1990s. These chapters are linked to the complexities of family, romance and international politics.

Brooks, who was in Toronto recently to publicize People of the Book, said that her conversion to Judaism and her subsequent marriage to the Jewish American journalist Tony Horwitz were not factors in her decision to write it.

But in an interview, she admitted that her interest in Jewish matters goes back a long way, to her Irish Catholic childhood in Sydney, Australia, where she was born in 1955.

Her American father, a successful big band singer originally from California, was posted to Palestine during World War II, assigned to an entertainment unit in the Australian army.

He liked Jews he met in Palestine and was sympathetic to Zionism. “He was a lefty Zionist,” said Brooks, who resides on Martha’s Vineyard with her husband and son.

As a high school student, Brooks wrote  term papers on Nazi Germany, the Holocaust and Israel. She credits her dad for having introduced her to these and other Jewish-related topics.

After working as a general assignment reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald, she  received a scholarship to do a master’s degree in journalism at the Columbia School of Journalism. At a class, she met and fell in love with Horwitz, who won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1995 while on the staff of the Wall Street Journal.

She had no problem converting to Judaism. “It was a very easy step for me to take, and did not require any great soul searching,” explained Brooks, a petite, pleasant person with an electric smile. “It had more to do with history than religion. If I was to marry a Jew, I didn’t want to be responsible for the end of the line of his Jewish heritage.”

Comparing Judaism to journalism, Brooks – a member of a Reconstructionist synagogue –  said, “Judaism is a close analysis of text and the meaning of words. Plus, the music is great.”

Based in Cairo as a foreign correspondent from 1987 to 1992, Brooks reported from Egypt, Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Eritrea and Nigeria (where she was briefly arrested). She then covered the United Nations from New York City.  She left the Wall Street Journal to tend to her son, Nathaniel. “Journalism was not compatible with child raising.”

Turning to book writing, she wrote her first non-fictional work, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women – a bestseller translated into 17 languages – in 1994.  She followed that up with Foreign Correspondence, a memoir, in 1997. Brook’s first novel, Year of Wonders, was set in 17th-century Britain. Her second novel, March, which takes place during the American Civil War, earned the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2006.