This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Sarajevo Haggadah was made around 1350 in the Kingdom of Aragon, most likely in Barcelona, when Sephardic Jewish communities in Christian Spain produced some of the most lavishly illustrated Hebrew manuscripts of the Middle Ages. It is written on one hundred forty two leaves of bleached calfskin vellum, so thin the parchment is almost translucent, illuminated with gold leaf and rich pigment. The manuscript opens with thirty four leaves of sixty nine painted miniatures running from Creation through the early history of Israel, ending with Joshua taking up Moses's succession, a visual retelling set before the Haggadah's own text begins. What follows is the Passover Haggadah proper, the blessings, questions and readings recited at the Seder table, in medieval Sephardic Hebrew square script, closing with a set of Hebrew liturgical poems.
Scholars believe the manuscript was made as a wedding gift. Early in the book, the coats of arms of two Sephardic families, the Shoshan and the Elazar households, appear beside the arms of Barcelona itself, read as marking a marriage joining the two families under the city's own seal. Its wine stained pages are a second kind of evidence: unlike a showpiece kept only for display, this Haggadah was carried to the table and used, Passover after Passover, exactly as intended.
Its style belongs to the same Catalan illuminated tradition as the roughly contemporary Golden Haggadah, and it stands among the finest surviving examples of the genre. Who painted it is not recorded; what survives is the manuscript itself, unusually complete for a six hundred seventy year old book that left its origin within two lifetimes of its making and crossed Europe before coming to rest in Sarajevo.