The Book of Exodus.(Sarajevo Haggadah)

When the Axis powers conquered and divided Yugoslavia, in the spring of 1941, Sarajevo did not fare well. The city cradled by mountains that Rebecca West once described as like "an opening flower" suddenly found itself absorbed into the Nazi puppet state of Croatia, its tolerant, cosmopolitan culture crushed by the invading German Army and the Croatian Fascist Ustashe. Hitler's ally, Ante Pavelic, who had headed the Ustashe through the nineteen-thirties, proclaimed that his new state must be "cleansed" of Jews and Serbs: "Not a stone upon a stone will remain of what once belonged to them."

The terror began on April 16th, when the German Army entered Sarajevo and sacked the city's eight synagogues. The Sarajevo pinkas, a complete record of the Jewish community from its earliest days, was confiscated and sent to Prague, never to be recovered. Deportations followed. Jews, Gypsies, and Serb resisters turned frantically to sympathetic Muslim or Croat neighbors to hide them. Fear of denunciation spread through the city, penetrating every workplace, even the imposing neo-Renaissance halls of the Bosnian National Museum.

The museum's chief librarian, an Islamic scholar named Dervis Korkut, was an unlikely figure of resistance, but he had already made his anti-Fascist feelings clear, in an article defending the city's beleaguered Jews. A handsome, dapper man with a neatly trimmed mustache, he wore well-tailored three-piece suits complemented by a fez. In early 1942, when Korkut heard that a Nazi commander, General Johann Fortner, had arrived at the museum to speak to its director, he immediately feared for the museum library's greatest treasure, a masterpiece of medieval Judaica known as the Sarajevo Haggadah. A Haggadah, from the Hebrew root "HGD"--"to tell"--relates the story of the exodus from Egypt, which Jews are commanded to tell to their children. It is used at the table during the Passover Seder. (Wine stains on the parchments of the Sarajevo Haggadah testify that this book, though lavishly designed, was read at such family feasts.)

There were rumors, at the time, of Hitler's nascent plan for a "museum of an extinct race." Synagogues and community buildings in Josevof, the Jewish quarter of Prague, had been spared destruction so that, when all of Europe's Jews had been obliterated, it could become a caricature "Jew Town" for Aryan tourists to visit, populated by Czech actors in Hasidic garb. The museum's future exhibits would eventually fill fifty warehouses. The best of Europe's Judaica was being amassed as part of the general plunder under the authority of Alfred Rosenberg, the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Rosenberg's collection was intended to facilitate a new branch of scholarship: Judenforschung ohne Juden (Jewish studies without Jews). Hitler admired Rosenberg's impeccable Fascist aesthetics (Rosenberg had decried Expressionism as "syphilitic") and in 1940 had directed the Wehrmacht to extend all possible assistance to his unit. By the war's end, the Germans had looted more than thirty thousand items of Judaica--silk Torah mantles, prayer shawls, silver ritual cups and dishes, and portraits, kitchenware, and other domestic items that reflected centuries of Jewish life. And there were more than a hundred thousand Yiddish and Hebrew books. The Sarajevo Haggadah could easily have been one of them.

Korkut probably hadn't heard of Hitler's museum, but he had seen ancient Torah scrolls destroyed in Sarajevo's streets. When the museum's director, a respected Croatian archeologist who did not speak German, called for Korkut to act as a translator, a few minutes before his meeting with Fortner, Korkut pleaded to be allowed to take the Haggadah and keep it out of Nazi hands. The director was reluctant. "You will be risking your life," he warned. Korkut replied that the book was his responsibility as kustos--custodian of the library's two hundred thousand volumes. So the two men hurried to the basement, where the Haggadah was kept in a safe whose combination only the director knew. He took the book from a protective box and handed it to Korkut. Korkut lifted his coat and tucked the small codex, which measured about six by nine inches, into the waistband of his trousers. He smoothed his jacket, making sure that no bulges broke the line of his suit, and the two men made their way back upstairs to face the General.

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. Dervis's brother, Besim, a professor of Arabic, made the first good translation of the Koran into Serbo-Croatian. Dervis, born in the old Ottoman capital of Bosnia, Travnik, in 1888, aspired to be a doctor, but his father insisted that he continue the family tradition of religious scholarship. He studied theology at Istanbul University and Near Eastern languages at the Sorbonne. He spoke at least ten languages and served for a time as the senior official in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia's ministry of religious affairs and as an honorary consul for France.

His interests were wide-ranging. He wrote papers on history and architecture, and a tract against alcohol abuse. But his abiding interest was the culture of Bosnia's minority communities, including Albanians and Jews. In 1941, after Yugoslavia tried to appease the Nazis by passing anti-Jewish laws, Korkut wrote a paper titled "Anti-Semitism Is Foreign to the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina," in which he explored the benign history of Bosnia's intercommunal relations and pointed out that the Jews, rather than being the predatory financial manipulators of propaganda, were more likely to be found in the Bosnian underclass.