Emily Barton writes in the LAT:
Geraldine Brooks has based her new novel, "People of the Book," on the real-life adventures of a 14th century Hebrew codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah, a richly illuminated version of the narrative Jews around the world use at their Passover tables each spring to tell the story of the Exodus. The manuscript surfaced in 1894 and caused an uproar among art historians, who had long believed that the Third Commandment, which prohibits the making of "any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth," had precluded the use of figurative art by medieval Jews.
The Sarajevo Haggadah embodies the miracle of Jewish survival in Europe: Created in Spain during the convivencia, a period when Jews, Christians and Muslims engaged in free cultural exchange, it somehow survived the 1492 Spanish expulsion of the Jews and a later destruction of heretical books in 17th century Venice. It made its way to cosmopolitan Sarajevo and was saved from destruction during World War II by the Muslimchieflibrarianof the Bosnian National Museum, who stashed the book under his coat when a Nazi came to claim it and hid it until war’s end in a remote mountain mosque.
