I just spent 90 minutes lecturing on the Sarajevo Haggadah and I will never not be utterly enchanted by that manuscript and its story...

Written and decorated for use by a (probably) Catalonian or Aragonese family around the year 1330. The identity and role of the African woman at the family table is still uncertain...

Probably left Spain with the family when the Jews were expelled in 1492. By 1510, it was in Italy, where it was sold, as indicated by this inscription (dated 25 "Agosto" of the year 270, i.e. 5270, i.e. 1510):

In 1609, Papal censor Giovanni Domenico Vistorini reviewed the manuscript and left his signature:

No one knows exactly what happened next, but by the late 19th century it had crossed the Adriatic from Italy to Bosnia. A young man named Joseph R. Cohen inherited it from his father and sold it to the National Museum in 1894.

The National Museum sent it to Vienna to be studied for an 1898 publication, after which it was put in a box in storage at the Ministry of Finance until the Museum thought to ask it to be returned in 1911! It was finally sent back in 1913.

In 1942, some time after the Nazi occupation of Sarajevo, the Nazi's demanded that the Museum hand it over. Instead, librarian Dervis Korkut hid it somewhere...we don't know where, but after the war it was found in a safe deposit box at the National Bank.

(It was stolen in 1955 but was quickly recovered)

During the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s, the Museum was literally in the crossfire and the Haggadah was hidden again. After the war, the President of Bosnia gave the manuscript to the Sarajevo Jewish Community. It is now preserved in the Museum in this high-security room.

And Miriam and the women keep dancing throughout it all...

What I find most moving is that the liturgy is so familiar to modern Jews. When I sit at seder with my family and the youngest reads The Four Questions, she is reading the same words that someone in this Catalan family read 700 years ago.

The Haggadah is covered with wine and haroset stains, just like my family's haggadot...

The diasporic journey of the manuscript mirrors those of so many Jewish families, including my own family's trajectory from Eastern Europe to Oklahoma and Texas.

Take a minute to appreciate this amazing Creation series, beginning with before-there-was-a-before and ending with a Catalan Jew resting on the Sabbath.

If you want to learn more about this extraordinary object, I highly recommend Shalom Sabar's recent facsimile and commentary volume, "The Sarajevo Haggadah in History & Art" (and sure, read "The People of the Book" if you want, but just remember that that's fiction).