Sarajevo סרייבו
A Sephardi town inside an Ottoman one: Ladino in the street, its own Purim and its own Haggadah.
The exiles from Spain spread through the Ottoman lands for half a century, and in the middle of the sixteenth century reached Bosnia. In Sarajevo they were given a quarter—the Velika Avlija, the Great Courtyard—and there a community took shape that lived four hundred years: Ladino at home and in the street, its own songs, its own books.
Two things from here are known beyond Bosnia. The first is the Sarajevo Haggadah: a fourteenth-century manuscript from Spain, brought by the exiles; twice it was saved from destruction—in 1942 a museum keeper hid it from the Germans, in 1992 it was carried out from under shelling. The second is the Purim di Saraj, the day the community established in memory of how the city freed the hakham Moshe Danon and ten elders from prison.
Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai was born here. The community was destroyed in the Shoah: of more than ten thousand Sarajevo Jews only a small part survived.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Documents of the period
- The Purim di Saraj scroll and the records of the Sarajevo community — the ordering of the community and its day of remembrance
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — the coming of the exiles, the Sarajevo Haggadah, the destruction of the community in the Shoah
Basis: documents and evidence.