A study that changed everything
A book about the book
Hello friend!
How are you?
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Shortly after the haggadah was purchased for the newly founded National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which at the time was under Austro-Hungarian rule, it was marked and taken to Vienna as Eine Spanisch-Judische Bilderhandschrift des Mittelalters (a Spanish-Jewish manuscript from the Middle Ages). In Vienna, the royal scholars conducted a detailed study of the manuscript and renamed it “the Sarajevo Haggadah.”
David Heinrich Müller, a Jewish liturgical expert, analyzed the paleography of the Sarajevo Haggadah, and Julius von Schlosser, an art historian and a member of Vienna School of Arts, examined the iconographical and stylistic features of the manuscript. David Kaufmann, Budapest scholar, supplemented this research with the study of other medieval Hebrew illuminated manuscripts, which at that time was the only systematic study on this subject. The observations of these three scholars were collected in the two-volume publication, Die Haggadah von Sarajevo, which was published in Vienna in 1898. This was the first scholarly publication dedicated to Jewish illuminated manuscripts and it had an important impact. It challenged the scholarly consensus about the existence of figurative art among Jews since it was commonly believed that this form of art does not exist in Jewish art because of the biblical “prohibitions” against making and worshiping images. This publication also introduced medieval Jewish book art to the scholarly world and prompted scholars to take up the study of Jewish illuminated manuscripts. I belong to a newer generation of scholars and will reveal some exciting discoveries in the coming months. Stay tuned!
Have a peaceful day of the rest (Shabbat) and a wonderful weekend ahead!
Aleksandra