Bechorot 8a ~ Rashi on Mermaids

While analysing the rules regarding the treatment of a firstborn donkey, the Talmud is sidetracked into a discussion of the breeding techniques of various animals.

בכורות ח, א

הדולפנין פרין ורבין כבני אדם מאי דולפנין אמר רב יהודה בני ימא

Dolphins reproduce like people. The Gemara asks: What are dolphins? Rav Yehuda says: They are creatures that are called sons of the sea.

And what exactly are those “sons of the sea”? Here is the explanation of the great French commentator Rashi (1040-1105):

דגים יש בים שחציין צורת אדם וחציין צורת דג ובלע"ז שריינ"א

There are certain fish in the ocean; half of the body has a human form, and half has the form of a fish. In French it is called a sereine.

Mermaids in early Greek and Rabbinic Literature

Today in French the word sirène means a mermaid, just as it did in the time of Rashi. And Sirenia is the scientific name for an order of aquatic herbivorous mammals such the manatee, which have a sort-of-human- form (if you don’t look too closely). But Rashi lived about five hundred years after the redaction of the Talmud, and so his explanation might not be exactly what R. Yehuda had in mind. However, the Sifra, the halakhic midrash (legal exegesis) on Leviticus, also mentions a sea creature called the sirene. And the Sifra was composed sometime before 350 CE, about 700 years before Rashi lived. The Sifra notes that when the Torah lists the aquatic animals that cannot be eaten (Lev. 11:10) it includes the seranit (הסרנית).

ספרא שמיני, ג:ז

'חיה' – זו חית הים; 'הנפש' – להביא את הסרנית‏. יכול תהיה מטמא באהל כדברי ר' חנינא? תלמוד לומר (במדבר יט, יד): זאת

In Greek literature, the sirens were dangerous sea creatures whose sensuous voice would lure sailors to their deaths. These stories appear Homer’s in the epic poem the Odyssey, composed around 800 BCE, which is to say, around 500 years before the composition of the Sifra. The point is, the legend of the mermaid has been around was around long, long before Rashi described them in his commentary. And it continued for many centuries after.

A manatee, or a mermaid?

Christopher Columbus saw mermaids

Christopher Columbus (yes, the one who “discovered” America) saw mermaids. Three of them. In an entry in his diary dated January 9th 1493 he wrote he had sighted three mermaids “which rose well out of the sea; but they are not so beautiful as they are painted, though to some extent they have the form of a human face.” These were most likely dugong, which has a fusiform body with no dorsal fin or hind limbs, and flippers in place of arms.

“Since once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That the rude sea grew civil at her song:
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To hear the sea-maid’s music.”

— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream Act II, scene 1.

More Modern sightings of Mermaids

Mermaid sightings continued. In 1881 there were reports of of them in the Susquehanna River in York, Pennsylvania. Actually, there were five sightings, though all made by the same fisherman, a Mr. Henry Loucks, on what was, apparently, a slow news day:

He says it comes to the surface, looks about it, then gradually sinks down leaving its hair floating on top of the water for a moment or so and finally disappears.  It has the face of a woman and beautiful glossy black hair, but as it only shows itself down to the shoulders, he cannot tell what the other end is like.

He says he could shoot it but is afraid he might be arrested and tried for murder, and it would bring him into trouble.  On being asked if it had a comb or looking glass with it.  “It might have had, but he didn’t see it” and supposes it has a cave somewhere in the bottom of the river under the deep water.

Mr. Henry Loucks, the fisherman above alluded to, is well known in town, and he is considered as reliable as any fisherman on the river.  We are in hopes that the mermaid may be captured alive, if possible, or dead, if it cannot be had any other way, and guarantee him a safe delivery out of his troubles if he shoots it.

mermaids in the writings of the Chida, and in P.T. Barnum’s Museum

Chaim Yosef Dovid Azulai, known as the Chidah (1724-1806) was a rabbi, kabbalist, prolific scholar and major fundraiser for the Jewish settlement on Jerusalem. In his encyclopedic Midbar Kademut he described the same siren we read in Rashi on today’s page of Talmud, but with some additional flourishes.

דג יש בים שקורין סירינ"ה מחציו ולמעלה כדמות אשה בתולה ומחציו ולמטה כתבנית דג ומקום משכנה בסלעים ומקומות מסוכנים בים ומדי עבור איזה ספינה תתחיל לשורר ולזמר בקול נעים הרבה עד כי תפיל חבלי שינה על כל אנשי האניה, ואחר כך נכנסת לתוכה והורגת ואוכלת יושביה

The top part of the body is that of a virgin, the bottom that of a fish. It lives among rocks in dangerous places, and when a ship passses it begins to sings with a beautiful voice, until the sailors are overtaken with sleep. After that it climbs on board, and kills and eats everyone…

The Feejee Mermaid

Among the many weird creatures that P.T. Barnum displayed in his famous museum in 1842, one of the most well known was the Feejee (or Fiji )Mermaid, which was, in fact the body of a young monkey sewn onto the trunk of a fish. It was apparently purchased from some Japanese sailors (for $6,000!) and later brought to America, but it quickly dropped out of sight. There were rumors that it had been lost in one of the three fires that gutted Barnum’s collections over the years, but a creature in Harvard’s Peabody Museum may actually be the one from P.T Barnum’s collection.

One of the earliest depictions of the specimen that was to become the Feejee Mermaid, in the collections of the British Library (Asia, Pacific & Africa P/T 2937). Courtesy and copyright,The British Library Board. From Mermaids Uncovered. Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 27 (2014), pp. 98-116

Rav Yehuda, Rashi, and the Chida didn’t make up the legend of the mermaid. It existed for many centuries before they recorded it, and judging by this report in Haaretz, sightings of mermaids are likely to be with us for many centuries to come.

“Is a Mermaid Living Under the Sea in Northern Israel?

Some residents of Kiryat Yam are convinced the city is home to a mermaid, and the town’s local council is offering $1 million to anyone who can prove the aquatic damsel exists.

Over recent months, dozens of people in the Haifa suburb have reported seeing a creature that resembles a young girl leaping out of the water and doing aerial tricks across the waves before disappearing to her home under the sea.

The story has caused quite a splash in Kiryat Yam, with dozens of onlookers flocking to the town’s beach at sunset, cameras in tow, to catch a glimpse of the mermaid and hopefully, the million dollar photo.”

— Haaretz.com, December 8, 2009

Bechorot 7a ~ Pig x Sheep

In today's page of Talmud there is a debate regarding the crossbreeding of different species, and the possibility that a non-kosher animal (say, a pig) could fertilize a kosher animal (like a sheep):

בכורות ז, א

והאמר ר' יהושע בן לוי לעולם אין מתעברת לא טמאה מן הטהור ולא טהורה מן הטמא ולא גסה מן הדקה ולא דקה מן הגסה ולא בהמה מן חיה ולא חיה מן בהמה חוץ מר' אליעזר ומחלוקתו שהיו אומרים חיה מתעברת מבהמה

...R. Yehoshua ben Levi said: A non-kosher female can never conceive from a kosher male, nor a kosher female from a non-kosher male, nor a large animal from a small animal, nor a small animal from a large animal, nor a domesticated animal from a non-domesticated animal, nor a non-domesticated animal from a domesticated animal, except for R. Eliezer and his disputant [in Chulin 79b], who claimed that a non-domesticated animal can conceive from a domesticated animal...(Bechorot 7a)

Here is the Talmud in Bava Kama that records that view of “R. Eliezer and his disputant.”

בבא קמא עז, ב – עח, א

ואמר רבא זה בנה אב כל מקום שנאמר שה אינו אלא להוציא את הכלאים ...אמר לך ר"א כי איתמר דרבא לטמא שנולד מן הטהור ועיבורו מן הטמא...וטהורה מטמאה מי מיעברא אין דקיי"ל דאיעבר מקלוט 

Rava said this establishes a model and teaches that wherever the term שה [seh] is stated in the Bible, it is meant to exclude a hybrid... R. Eliezer would say to you  - when did Rava state his model?  With respect to a non-kosher animal that was born from a kosher mother and a non-kosher father...But can a kosher animal conceive from a non-kosher animal? Yes, for it has been established that this case refers to a kosher animal that was conceived from a [kosher mutant animal that was] born with uncloven hooves. (Bava Kamma 77b-78a)

A pig in sheep's clothing? Nope. Just a pig.

Here the Talmud claims that a non-kosher animal (say, a pig) could not fertilize a kosher animal (like a sheep). If an animal appears to have the features of a sheep-pig cross-breed, it is, in fact, the offspring of a kosher animal that is breed with another kosher animal but which looks non-kosher because of a mutation that causes it to have non-cloven hooves. Here is that case:

k= kosher; m= mutant, born with non-cloven hooves

Which leads to the question of the day: Can a kosher animal indeed successfully breed with a non-kosher animal? Let's take a look.

When a pig loves a sheep

Pigs have been known to act, well, like pigs, and copulate with sheep. But could this lead to a baby peep, or ship, or whatever you'd like to call it? There are pictures that suggest this may be so, but in actual fact this pig with wool is the rare Hungarian Mangalitza pig, and has no sheep ancestry.  

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Foster Dwight Coburn, a farmer who also served as the secretary of the Kansas Department of Agriculture published Swine in America; a text-book for Breeder, Feeder and Student, and on page 63 he made the following observation: 

There exists in some sections of Old Mexico a type of “hog” represented as the product of crossing a ram with a sow, and the term “Cuino” has been applied to this rather violent combination. The ram used as a sire to produce the Cuino is kept with the hogs from the time he is weaned. A resident of Mexico has given the following description of the Cuino: “The sow used to produce the Cuino belongs to any race, but as a rule to the Razor-Back family, which is the more numerous. There is never any difficulty with her accepting the ram when breeding time comes. The progeny is a pig—unmistakably a pig—with the form and all the characteristics of the pig, but he is entirely different from his dam if she is a Razor-Back. He is round-ribbed and blocky, his short legs cannot take him far from his sty, and his snout is too short to root with. His head is not unlike that of the Berkshire. His body is covered with long, thick, curly hair, not soft enough to be called wool, but which nevertheless he takes from his sire. His color is black, white-black, and white-brown and white. He is a good grazer and is mostly fed on grass with one or two ears of corn a day, and on these he fattens quickly. The Cuino reproduces itself, and is often crossed a second and third time with a ram. Be it what it may, the Cuino is the most popular breed of hogs in the state of Oaxaca, and became so on account of their propensity to fatten on little food.”

It may have been the most popular pig breed in Oxaca, but it was still rather an oddity in the US; newspapers found them interesting, as evidenced by two reports, from 1902 and 1908 about sheep-pig hybrids.  

The Minneapolis Journal, September 24, 1902, from here.

Los Angeles Herald. October 3, 1908, from here.

Species and interbreeding

Despite these reports, it would seem that the rule suggested by R. Yehoshua ben Levi is correct. Different species cannot successfully interbreed, because, well, because that's the definition of a species, as the Oxford English Dictionary makes clear:

A group of living organisms consisting of similar individuals capable of exchanging genes or interbreeding. The species is the principal natural taxonomic unit, ranking below a genus and denoted by a Latin binomial, e.g., Homo sapiens.

So although it is a tautology, you get the idea: a species by definition can only breed with other members of its own species. If a pig and a sheep could breed and have offspring, they'd be members of the same species. But they are not. Pigs belong to genus Sus, and the species Scrofa, whereas sheep belong to the genus Ovis and the species Aries. Pigs have 38 chromosomes, and sheep have 54.  So they cannot cross-breed.  (Lions and tigers both have 38 chromosomes, so they can cross breed, and produce a liger.)

But it's not as simple as that.  Even if you don't have the same number of chromosomes, you can still sometimes breed outside your species. Horses have 64 chromosomes and donkeys have 62. Yet they can cross breed, resulting in a mule (if mom was a horse) or a hinny (if mum was a donkey), although these are nearly always sterile. Horses belong to the genus Equus and the species ferus, and donkeys belong to the same genus but to a different species, africanus.  Yet they can interbreed.  Which raises the question: should a horse and a donkey be re-classified as belonging to the same species? But that would be odd, because they look so different and act in very different ways.

These kinds of questions  are perplexing, and have challenged the world of biology since the time of Carl Linnaeus (d. 1778) who gave the world a way of categorizing and naming all living things called binomial nomenclature. Briefly it goes like this: the grey wolf belongs to the genus Canis and the species lupus.  Dogs belong to the same genus, Canis, and are a subspecies of wolves, so their scientific name is Canis lupus familiaris (which I suppose makes it a trinomial nomenclature).  We belong to the genus Homo and the species sapiens, whereas chimpanzees belong to a different genus and species, Pan troglodytes. Anyway just what gets a creature into one species class or another is a really challenging question, one that is still being played out in the scientific literature. There's even a 320 page book from the University of California Press in which the author "provides a new perspective on the relationship between philosophical and biological approaches" to the concept of a species. For now, though, R. Yehoshua ben Levi's generalization found in Bechorot is pretty close to the Linnaean taxonomy we use today.  We can also conclude that the general rule of the Talmud from today's daf, that a kosher animal could not successfully breed with a non-kosher one, is a pretty good rule of thumb.

“Every living thing loves its like,
and every person his own sort.
All creatures flock together with their kind.”

— Ecclesiasticus, 13:15.

[Repost from Bava Kama 77.]

From the Passover Archives ~ The Chemistry of Chametz

It is Pesach (Passover) on tomorrow night, so let’s review the chemistry of unleavened bread, called chametz.

מנחות ע,ב

מנא הני מילי אמר ריש לקיש אתיא לחם לחם ממצה כתיב הכא (במדבר טו, יט) והיה באכלכם מלחם הארץ וכתיב התם (דברים טז, ג) לחם עוני 

והתם גופה מנלן אמר ריש לקיש וכן תנא דבי ר' ישמעאל וכן תנא דבי ר' אליעזר בן יעקב אמר קרא (דברים טז, ג) לא תאכל עליו חמץ שבעת ימים תאכל עליו מצות לחם עוני דברים הבאים לידי חימוץ אדם יוצא בהן ידי חובתו בפסח יצאו אלו שאין באין לידי חימוץ אלא לידי סירחון

How do we know that matzah must be made from one of five species of grain [wheat, barley, oats spelt and rye]?  Reish Lakish said, and likewise a Sage of the school of Rabbi Yishmael taught, and likewise a Sage of the school of Rabbi Eliezer ben Ya’akov taught, that the verse states: “You shall eat no leavened bread with it; seven days you shall eat with it matzah, the bread of affliction” (Deuteronomy 16:3). This verse indicates that only with regard to substances that will come to a state of leavening does a person fulfill his obligation to eat matzah by eating them on Passover, provided that he prevents them from becoming leavened. This serves to exclude these foods, i.e., rice, millet, and similar grains, which, even if flour is prepared from them and water is added to their flour, do not come to a state of leavening but to a state of decay [sirḥon].

The important question we need to answer here is whether there is something fundamentally different about rice when compared to the five grain species that can become chametz. And is there any scientific support to the claim that rice spoils sooner than it ferments?

The Chemistry of bread making

To get at the answers we need to remind ourselves how plants make and consume starch. They take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and water from the soil, and using the energy contained in sunlight (and the magic of chlorophyll) convert the two into a large sugar molecule we call starch. Plants use this starch to store and provide them with energy.

If you grind up wheat (or many other species of grain) you make flour which contains loads of starch. In addition to starch, flour contains proteins and enzymes which become important when the flour is mixed with water. Without going down a rabbit-hole of detail, here in general is what happens. First, an enzyme called beta-amylase breaks the large starch molecule down into a smaller molecule called maltose which is made up of two molecules of glucose. Another enzyme, maltase, breaks down each molecule of maltose into two molecules of glucose which is then broken down further to provide the plant with energy. Here is what it looks like:

From Lloyd, James R and Kötting, Oliver (July 2016) Starch Biosynthesis and Degradation in Plants. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd: Chichester.

If you add some yeast into that mix, a chemical reaction called fermentation occurs. Yeast, which is a fungus, consumes glucose and turns it into carbon dioxide and ethanol, which is an alcohol.

As the flour and water and yeast all mix together, two proteins in the flour called gliadin and glutenin (which are glutens) give the dough mixture its characteristic body, which strengthens the more it is mixed. The dough traps the carbon dioxide that is given off by the yeast cells, which causes the bread to rise. And that gives us the leavened bread we call chametz.

Of course when matzah is made, we do not add yeast to the dough. But there are yeast particles in the air and these will inevitably land on the dough where they will act in the same way, consuming glucose and creating carbon dioxide and alcohol. This process is much slower than when yeast is added when bread is made, but the plain dough will rise a little as a result.

The differences between grains and rice

Resh Lakish (together with those sages of the schools of Rabbi Yishmael and Rabbi Eliezer ben Ya’akov) claim that unlike grains, rice does not ferment when water is added to it. Instead it spoils. That’s why it may be eaten on Passover (unless of course you are an Ashkenazi Jew, in which case you still can’t eat it, but for another reason we’re not going to get into). Is this in fact the case?

I know next to nothing about plant biology. But Dr Angus Murphy does. He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Plant Science at the University of Maryland, and wrote the textbook on plant physiology. Dr. Murphy was kind enough to have a long chat with me over the phone and he agreed with the suggestion that grains and rice do very different things when mixed with water. The wheat seed is surrounded by the endosperm, which is itself covered by the aluerone layer. This aleurone is rich in amylase which as you recall is needed to breakdown starch into glucose (which is eaten by yeast which releases carbon dioxide and alcohol which causes the dough to rise…) However (most species of) rice do not contain this aleurone layer. So they have very little amylase, which means that it takes them a much longer time to convert starch into glucose. In fact it takes so long that by the time there is enough yeast in the dough for it to start to rise, bacteria in the air will have colonized the mixture and started breaking down the proteins in the dough. And that protein breakdown is what makes the mixture spoil, and which is what the Talmud calls סירחון. To conclude, Professor Murphy thought that the Talmud’s description of the difference between grain and rice was firmly based in plant biology.

The fine print and the final verdict

Distribution of variou types of amylases in rice grains. (Beta-Amylase activity was expressed in terms of maltose mg liberated in 3 min at 30°C by 1 g of ground rice samples.) From Ryu Shinke, Hiroshi Nishira & Narataro Mugibayashi. Types of Amylases in Rice Grains. Agricultural and Biological Chemistry 1973; 37:10, 2437-2438

Of course things are a little more complicated than that. (They always are.) Different kinds of wheat flour contain different amounts of amylase. Fine bleached white flour contains less amylase than say whole wheat flour, because the aleurone layer in whole wheat flour has not been broken down. Similarly, different species of rice contain different amounts of amylase, so that while standard white rice has very little, brown rice has considerably more. During talmudic times, the wheat flour would have been far less processed than any of the flour we would use today. As a result it would contain more amylase, and would have risen faster than would today’s four-water mixtures.

But as a rule of thumb, the Talmud is, biochemically speaking, spot on. When mixed with water, the five species of grain from which matzah may be made do undergo fermentation even without the addition of yeast, while rice will spoil long before the fermentation process becomes noticeable.

Talmudology wishes all its readers a very happy Passover (or Easter).

From the Passover Archives: How the Sarajevo Haggadah was Saved. Twice.

But First, a Note From Talmudology:

Since this post was first published in 2018, Talmudology received additional information from Zvonimir Snagic, who identified himself as the great-nephew of Dr. Jozo Petrovic. Petrovic was director of the State Museum when the Sarajevo Haggadah housed there was hidden from the Nazis. Mr. Snagic supplied Talmudology with both testimony from his family and evidence that Dr. Petrovic played at least as large a role in the story as did Devis Korut. We have amended the post in light of this new information, and are grateful to Mr. Snagic.

Of all the medieval illuminated Haggadot that exist, the Sarajevo Haggadah is perhaps the most famous.  It is thought to have been created in Barcelona around 1350, and today it is on display at the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. If you are thinking of visiting it at the museum, plan ahead. The Haggadah is on display Tuesdays and Thursdays, and first Saturday of the month from noon to 1pm.  You may visit at other times, if you pony up more money and let them know in advance. According to the Museum, the Haggadah is "its most valuable holding," and for good reason. It has three sections: the first has 34 full page small biblical illuminations from the creation of the world to the death of Moses. The next is the text of the traditional Haggadah, and the last section contains poems and readings to be read on each of the seven days of Passover.  The illustrations are masterpieces in miniature; deep indigo and red across a golden background, with elegantly elongated Hebrew letters that seem to drip down the page. It is in every way, the gold standard of Haggadot.

The remarkable History of the Sarajevo Haggadah

We know little of the first five-hundred years of the Haggadah. The name of the original owner is not known, and it appears to have been taken out of Spain in 1492, when Jews were expelled by the Alhambra Decree. There is a note written by a Catholic priest, Giovanni Domenico Vistorini, who inspected the Haggadah in 1609 for any anti-Christian content. Vistorini, who was most likely a converted Jew, found nothing objectionable in the Haggadah. "His Latin inscription, Revisto per mi (“Surveyed by me”)" wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning author Geraldine Brooks "runs with a casual fluidity beneath the last, painstakingly calligraphed lines of the Hebrew text." The Haggadah then disappeared for almost three centuries, until it was sold to the National Museum by a Joseph Kohen in 1894. 

“The Haggada rescue story could, therefore, be placed in the category of verbal communication of a narrow circle of people that share a common past, and in their repeated remembrances of the event, the story becomes rich with new forms and meanings. Such a tale has not yet become a fully formed historical story (legend) as it is known in the theory and history of literature, with the strong likelihood that in the future such a tale may become a standardized verbal communication pattern of past events.
”

— Kemal Bakaršić. The Story of the Sarajevo Haggada. Judaica Librarianship 1995: 9(1–2); 135-143.

Jozo Petrovic & Dervis Korut save the Haggadah

That the Sarajevo Haggadah had survived that long was highly improbable, but a series of even more unlikely events were to come.  On April 16, 1942 the Nazis invaded Sarajevo and immediately destroyed the city's eight synagogues. The director of the State Museum at that time was an archaeologist, Dr. Jozo Petrovic (1892-1967), a Croat from Bosnia. It was Petrovic who was charged with giving a tour to a group of high-ranking Nazis that included the much feared General Johann Fortner. They were looking for the Haggadah to add to their proposed "Museum of an Extinct Race," and during this whole episode, it was in Dr. Petrovic's briefcase. The visit lasted about one hour, and before his departure General Fortner turned to Dr. Petrovic. “Und jetz, bitte, Qbergeben Sie mir die Haggadah!" (And now, please, hand me the Haggadah!) Geraldine Brooks picks up the story:

The museum director feigned dismay. “But, General, one of your officers came here already and demanded the Haggadah,” he said. “Of course, I gave it to him.."...

“What officer?” Fortner barked. “Name the man!”

The reply was deft: “Sir, I did not think it was my place to require a name.”

Petrovic had come from Belgrade to run the museum, and he was not familiar with local villages and populations. He therefore asked another librarian, Dervis M. Korkut, to move the Haggadah out of Sarajevo. Korut agreed, and (according to one version) he hid it in the mosque of a small nearby village. There an Imam kept an eye on it and returned it at the end of the war.  The Haggadah had been saved by brave Muslims.

Whoever saves one human life...

“The man so determined to protect a Jewish book was the scion of a prosperous, highly regarded family of Muslim alims, or intellectuals, famous for producing judges of Islamic law.”

— Geraldine Brooks. The Book of Exodus. The New Yorker, Dec 3, 2007.

While the Koruts are best remembered for the role of Dervis in saving the Sarajevo Haggadah, it is not this achievement of which the family is most proud. “In our family, the Haggadah is a detail,” his son said.“What my father did for Jewish people—that is the biggest thing that we, in our family, have to be proud of.”

In 1942, shortly after hiding the Haggadah, a sixteen-year-old girl named Mira Papo came to Korut and asked to be hidden. The family took her in, dressed her as a Muslim, and passed her off as their maid. Four months later they arranged for Mira to join her aunt at an area on the Dalmatian coast where there was no Nazi presence. She survived the war and later moved to Israel. And then, in 1994, Mira wrote a testimony of her rescue and submitted it Yad Vashem.  Korut Dervis, who had died in 1969, and his wife Servet were added to the names of the Righteous Among the Nations. Servet received a certificate, a pension, and the right to Israeli citizenship.  

Just when the story seemed to have reached its conclusion, another dramatic episode began.  In 1999, at the height of the atrocities of the civil war in Kosovo, the Korut’s youngest daughter Lamija, and her Muslim husband were forced from their home by Serbian militiamen. They were sent to a refugee camp in which the conditions were so appalling that they were forced to flee. The couple were refused asylum by France and Sweden, and in desperation they turned to the small Jewish community of Skopje in Macedonia.  Somehow, Lamija still had with her the certificate that Yad Vashem had given to her mother. She showed it to Victor Mizrahi, the president of the community, and four days later, Lamija and her husband landed in Tel Aviv. The Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was at the airport to welcome them. “Today, we are closing a great circle in that the state of Israel, which emerged from the ashes, gives refuge to the daughter of those who saved Jews,” he said. And then, in the chaos of the media frenzy at the airport Lamija heard someone calling her in Serbo-Croation.

“It was a good feeling, to have someone speaking your language,” she said. But she had no idea who it could be, greeting her so warmly. Pushing through the crowd was a slender, wiry man she had never seen before, with a shock of dark hair and a mustache. Opening his arms, he introduced himself, and Lamija fell into the embrace of Davor Bakovic, the son of Mira Papo.

The Haggadah is restored

It's a remarkable story, which I hope you will share at your Pesach Seder when you reach the passage שפיך חמתך על הגוים - "pour out Your wrath on the Gentiles who do not know You..." But having taken a deep breath and dried our eyes, let's return to the Haggadah itself. In her 2008 novel The People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks opens in Sarajevo, where, under the watch of staff from the United Nations and security officers from the State Museum, an Australian conservator works on the Sarajevo Haggadah.

Pataki at work repairing the Sarajevo Haggadah. Photo courtesy of Andrea Pataki.

In fact the real Hagaddah did undergo conservation, but it was carried out by Andrea Pataki, from Stuttgart, Jean-Marie Arnolt of Paris, and the late Prof. Bezalel Narkiss, Professor Emeritus of Art History at the Hebrew University. These three experts wrote of their experience in conserving the Haggadah in a paper published in The Paper Conservator in 2005. For those of you who let your subscription lapse, you can find a copy here.

Andrea Pataki is a book conservator of world renown. For almost a decade she led the Studiengang für Papierrestaurierung, the Book and Paper Conservation Program at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, before taking up her present position as a professor at the Technical University of Cologne. Pataki is not Jewish, but had lost Jewish relatives in the Holocaust. Recalling her own role in the project, she never considered it significant that she was a Gentile born in Vienna now repairing a manuscript once pursued by the Nazis. Instead, she noted that she was hired because of her expertise and experience. Her own background was of little consequence. And that is how it should be.

In December 2001 Pataki spent nine days repairing the Haggadah at the Union Bank in Sarajevo. Each day, she recalled later in in an academic paper,

... the manuscript was brought to the 'conservation lab' in its metal box which was opened by representatives of the Museum. Working hours were from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm, after which the manuscript was locked in its box and promptly returned to the vault of the Union Bank. As a consequence, it was necessary to stop treatment each day at a stage at which the manuscript could be closed and put away safely.This meant making sure that all repairs would have adequate time to dry during the day, which required a great deal of planning and foresight.

Pataki found that the original covers of the Haggadah, which had certainly been made of vellum, were lost. In their place were cheap cardboard covers in a Turkish floral design, which were entirely orthogonal to the style of the Haggadah. Several sections, called quires, were detached from the rest of the book and needed to be carefully sewn back into place.  The book joints, where the outer boards of the cover meet the spine, had broken. This allowed Pataki access to the binding underneath. She repaired one of the four cords that ran vertically down the spine and around which the quires are sewn. The joints were reattached. Finally, she repaired the head a tail caps at the top and bottom of the spine with new calf leather that had been specially dyed for this restoration.

Of all the damage that the Haggadah had suffered, none was more important than the wine stains, just like those found on the pages of family Haggadot to this day.  Here is Pataki’s assessment:

The ritual of washing the hands twice during the ceremony had resulted in water stains on the parchment and smudges and smearing of pigments. The ceremony also calls for the drinking of four cups of wine and consumption of different foods dipped in salt water, before and during the festive meal. This activity resulted in many stains and discoloured areas on the pages which call for ritual drinking and eating…

What was to a conservator a sign of damage and discoloration was to the Jewish community a symbol of continuity. The stains were a testament that the Sarajevo Haggadah had not been left on a shelf, but had been used at the table, guiding the Seder night for hundreds of years.

“Due to the use of the manuscript on the Passover table for many generations, the main damage to the text-block had been caused by liquid. ”

— Pataki A., Narkiss, B., Arnoult, J. The conservation of the Sarajevo Haggadah, The Paper Conservator, 2005: 29:1, 63-66.

The Sarajevo Haggadah as a symbol of  Tolerance and Hope

Neal Kritz, a lawyer at the United States Institute for Peace, was in Sarajevo in the late 1990s. He was part of a delegation that focused on the restoration of the justice system and the atrocities that had occurred during the Bosnian civil war. Kritz recalled how the Bosnian Serbs had demanded the Sarajevo Haggadah be displayed in Banja Luka, the de facto capital of the newly created Serb republic.  It was their treasure too, they claimed; it did not just belong to the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Their demands were rejected, and the Haggadah remained in Sarajevo, where a new display of it opened there only last month. Kritz received a token of gratitude from the Chief Prosecutor of the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovnia. It was, of course, a facsimile edition of the Sarajevo Haggadah, which had now come to symbolize efforts to make peace between Bosnians and Serbs. And in November 2017, UNESCO added the Sarajevo Haggadah to their Memory of the World Register to mark, naturally, the International Day for Tolerance.

Over the last seventy years the Sarajevo Haggadah has twice been saved. First, three Muslims risked their lives to rescue it from those who sought to annihilate the Jewish people. And then it was saved from the ruins of time by an expert from the very country from which so much hate had originated.  The last word goes to Mirsad Sijarić, the Director of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina: "The Sarajevo Haggadah is physical proof of the openness of a society in which fear of the Other has never been an incurable disease."