The Book of Exodus

chroniClEs the book of exODus A double rescue in wartime Sarajevo. by GERalDine brooks hen the Axis powers conquered commanded to tell to their children. It Korkut pleaded to be allowed to take and divided Yugoslavia, in the is used at the table during the Passover the Haggadah and keep it out of Nazi springW of 1941, Sarajevo did not fare Seder. (Wine stains on the parchments hands. The director was reluctant. “You well. The city cradled by mountains that of the Sarajevo Haggadah testify that will be risking your life,” he warned. Rebecca West once described as like “an this book, though lavishly designed, was Korkut replied that as kustos—custodian opening flower” suddenly found itself read at such family feasts.) of the library’s two hundred thousand absorbed into the Nazi puppet state of There were rumors at the time of volumes—the book was his responsibil- Croatia, its tolerant, cosmopolitan cul- Hitler’s nascent plan for a “Museum of ity. So the two men hurried to the base- ture crushed by the invading German an Extinct Race.” Synagogues and com- ment, where the Haggadah was kept in Army and the Croatian Fascist Ustashe. munity buildings in Josevof, the Jewish a safe whose combination only the di- Hitler’s ally, Ante Pavelic, who had quarter of Prague, had been spared de- rector knew. He took the book from a headed the Ustashe through the nine- struction so that, when all of Europe’s protective box and handed it to Korkut. teen-thirties, proclaimed that his new Jews had been obliterated, it could be- Korkut lifted his coat and tucked the state must be “cleansed” of Jews and come a caricature “Jew Town” for Aryan small codex, which measured about six Serbs: “Not a stone upon a stone will re- tourists to visit, populated by Czech ac- by nine inches, into the waistband of his main of what once belonged to them.” tors in Hasidic garb. The museum’s fu- trousers. He smoothed his jacket, mak- The terror began on April 16th, ture exhibits would eventually fill fifty ing sure that no bulges broke the line of when the German Army entered Sara- warehouses. The best of Europe’s Juda- his suit, and the two men made their jevo and sacked the city’s eight syna- ica was being amassed as part of the way back upstairs to face the general. gogues. The Sarajevo pinkas, a complete general plunder under the authority of record of the Jewish community from its Alfred Rosenberg, the Reich Minister he man so determined to protect a earliest days, was sent to Prague and was for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Jewish book was the scion of a never recovered. Deportations followed. Rosenberg’s collection was intended to prosperous,T highly regarded family of Jews, Gypsies, and Serbian resisters facilitate a new branch of scholarship: Muslim alims, or intellectuals, famous turned frantically to sympathetic Mus- Judenforschung ohne Juden (Jewish stud- for producing judges of Islamic law. lim or Croat neighbors to hide them. ies without Jews). Hitler admired Dervis’s brother, Besim, a professor of Fear of denunciation spread through the Rosenberg’s impeccable Fascist aesthet- Arabic, made the first good translation city, penetrating every workplace, even ics (Rosenberg had decried Expression- of the Koran into Serbo-Croatian. Der- the imposing neo-Renaissance halls of ism as “syphilitic”) and in 1940 had di- vis, born in the old Ottoman capital of the Bosnian National Museum. rected the Wehrmacht to extend all Bosnia, Travnik, in 1888, aspired to be The museum’s chief librarian, an Is- possible assistance to his unit. By the a doctor, but his father insisted that he lamic scholar named Dervis Korkut, war’s end, the Germans had looted continue the family tradition of reli- was an unlikely figure of resistance, but more than thirty thousand items of Ju- gious scholarship. He studied theology he had already made his anti-Fascist daica—silk Torah mantles, prayer at the University of Istanbul and Near feelings clear, in an article defending the shawls, silver ritual cups and dishes, and Eastern languages at the Sorbonne. He city’s beleaguered Jews. A handsome, portraits, kitchenware, and other do- spoke at least ten languages and served dapper man with a neatly trimmed mestic items that reflected centuries of for a time as the senior official in the mustache, he wore well-tailored three- Jewish life. And there were more than a Kingdom of Yugoslavia’s ministry of re- piece suits complemented by a fez. In hundred thousand Yiddish and Hebrew ligious affairs and as an honorary consul early 1942, when Korkut heard that a books. The Sarajevo Haggadah could for France. Nazi commander, General Johann easily have been one of them. His interests were wide-ranging. He Fortner, had arrived at the museum to Korkut probably hadn’t heard of wrote papers on history and architecture speak to its director, he immediately Hitler’s museum, but he had seen an- and a tract against alcohol abuse. But his feared for the museum library’s greatest cient Torah scrolls destroyed in Saraje- abiding interest was the culture of Bos- treasure, a masterpiece of medieval Ju- vo’s streets. When the museum’s direc- nia’s minority communities, including daica known as the Sarajevo Haggadah. tor, a respected Croatian archeologist Albanians and Jews. In 1940, when Yu- A Haggadah, from the Hebrew root who did not speak German, called for goslavia tried to appease the Nazis by “HGD”—“to tell”—relates the story of Korkut to act as a translator, a few min- passing anti-Jewish laws, Korkut wrote a the exodus from Egypt, which Jews are utes before his meeting with Fortner, paper titled “Anti-Semitism Is Foreign to 74 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 3, 2007 TNY—2007_12_03—PAGE 74—133SC. the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegov- intriguing. In a scene that has mystified One man’s account, from Lisbon in ina,” in which he explored the benign his- scholars, a depiction of a Spanish Seder 1497, tells how he “dug a grave among tory of Bosnia’s intercommunal relations includes a woman whose ebony-black the roots of a blossoming olive tree” to and pointed out that the Jews, rather than skin and African features are in stark hide his books, knowing that it was un- being the predatory financial manipula- contrast to those of other family mem- likely he would ever return to unearth tors of propaganda, were more likely to be bers around the table but who holds a them: “Yet, although a tree flourishing found in the Bosnian underclass. piece of matzah—unleavened bread— with lovely fruit stood there . did I call As a prominent Muslim intellectual, and wears the costume of a wealthy it ‘Tree of Sorrow.’ ” Korkut had come under intense pres- Spanish Jew of the era. Sometime in the following century, sure to join a Fascist-leaning group known as the Young Muslims, which served as a kind of proving ground for the Handjar, a Muslim division of the S.S. He refused. Later in the war, he also refused an order signed by Ante Pavelic, requiring him to relocate to “the Croatian People’s Liberated Zagreb” to take charge of the library under the Ustashe government’s control. Korkut’s passionate interest in Bos- nia’s cultural diversity manifested itself in his studies of the region’s art and lit- erature. He was fascinated by the myr- iad influences in Sarajevan writing— how a lyric poem composed by a Slav might use classical Arabic and yet echo Latin verse forms carried to Sarajevo from the court of Diocletian on the Dalmatian coast. Of all the treasures in his care, none embodied the possibilities of diversity—or the fragility of intercul- tural harmony—as exuberantly as the Sarajevo Haggadah. The little parch- ment codex, rich in gold and silver leaf, lavishly illuminated with precious pig- ments made from lapis lazuli, azurite, and malachite, was created in Spain, perhaps as early as the mid-fourteenth century, during the period known as convivencia, when Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities lived in the sol y sombra—sun and shadow—of a shared existence. The illustrations re- semble those of medieval Christian Psalters, but some of the decoration calls to mind an Islamic style of orna- mentation. Quite apart from the opu- The Sarajevo Haggadah shows a woman with African features at a Passover Seder. lence and artistry of the illustrations, the na fact that they exist at all is extraordinary. The book’s survival is remarkable. In the Haggadah found its way to Venice, OVI eg RZ Until the codex came to light, in 1894, 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella issued the where a polyglot Jewish community E art historians widely believed that figu- Alhambra Decree expelling all Jews from thrived on a tiny island that had previ- D H an A rative painting had been entirely sup- Spain. If, as seems likely, the book left ously served as the city’s foundry, or I pressed among medieval Jews because Spain with a Jewish family at that time, ghetto. The first Jews, German loan sn of the injunction in the Ten Command- it was one of very few religious texts of its bankers among them, had arrived in the ments, “Thou shalt not make unto thee kind to survive confiscation and destruc- early sixteenth century. Next came Le- UM OF BO any graven image, or likeness of any tion. In Portugal, where many Spanish vantine Jews, whose ties to the Ottoman se L MU thing”—a proscription echoed in many Jews found a brief refuge before being ex- Empire were valuable to the city’s vast na Islamic, and some Christian, societies.

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