How Europe’s aristocrats were better at breeding horses than at breeding themselves

Philip of Habsburg with Juana the Mad … illustrating a book review in ‘The Economist’

Patrick Comerford

Throughout the lockdown, I have missed going into coffee shop and bookshops, and I have missed some of my favourite publications that have been part of my regular reading, including the New Statesman and The Tablet.

I miss reading regular contributors to the New Statesman such as Rowan Williams, Jonathan Sacks and Lucy Winkett, three of the great intellectuals and most thoughtful theologians in the England today.

Thanks to the kindness of neighbours and parishioners in Askeaton, I have continued to red The Irish Times and the Guardian almost daily, and thanks to family members I have postal subscriptions to the Economist each week and Private Eye fortnightly.

These have been regular reading all my adult life, and I have come to appreciate them even more during this time of semi-cocooning as a way of keeping in touch with ‘real life out there.’

The latest edition of the Economist has yet to arrive in the post, but the previous edition arrived late, in the middle of last week, and I am getting extended value out of it, from cover to cover.

Apart from its news coverage and insightful analysis, I also enjoy the Economist for its obituaries and especially for its cultural section. In particular, the book reviews are pithy and witty, informative and enjoyable, so much so that in recent months I have bought a number of books online after reading a review in the Economist.

These books include Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey through the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2019).

The previous edition of the Economist includes a review of The Habsburgs by Martyn Rady, recently published by Allen Lane and soon to be published in the US by basic Books.

This is an interesting combination of politics, history and genealogy, for it is impossible to imagine Europe for more than five centuries without the Habsburgs, described in this review as being ‘mad, bad and dangerous to marry.’

I have learned in recent weeks, as I explored the exotic claims to titles and aristocratic ancestry by a variety by people – from Count Henry Jerome de Salis (1740-1810), who was a canon and a priest in the Diocesan of Limerick or the two contemporary but unrelated incumbents in this diocese who claimed separately to hold the ancient title of The O’Hanlon, to Sir James Fitzgerald who lived in Lichfield and had no entitlement to the Irish title of baronet he used – that all genealogical explorations need to begin with a sense of humour and large pinches of salt.

It is a point made in another way by the reviewer in the Economist who writes, ‘If you ever wondered why marrying your uncle is inadvisable, the Habsburgs can enlighten you … The result was less a family tree, branching and widening, that a convoluted web.’

But to give an idea of the pungent wit and approach of the anonymous reviewer, here is a selection of quotations from this book review to illustrate the engaging quality of many of the cultural features in the Economist:

‘Philip of Habsburg … counted among his ancestors such unpromising genetic material as Albert the Lame, Leopold the Fat and, in age that excelled in the honest epithet, Frederick of the Empty Pockets.’

‘[This] book is billed as “the definitive history” of the clan. Not, it must be said, a hotly contested title.’

‘Once the names of Europe’s most powerful families – the Bourbons and Battenbergs and Garibaldis – were known across the world. Today, beyond the biscuit tin, they are largely forgotten.’

‘It is one of the abiding puzzles of European history that its aristocrats, so good at breeding horses, should have been so bad at breeding themselves.’

‘A list of the territories ruled by Charles V in 1521 notes that he was “King in Germany, of Castile, Aragon, Leon …”; the text runs to13 further lines and still ends with a breezy “etc”.’

‘[T]he Spanish Inquisition … did its job so effectively that even tattoos were censored.’

‘Over [the entire 16th] century, the output of the printing presses in Lima and Mexico was limited to fewer than 200 titles, most unbearably dull.’

‘Leopold I … is often criticised for spending too much on opera and too little on architecture, but this is unfair.’

‘Dante popped a Habsburg in his Purgatory, Titian immortalised them and Velazquez painted them.’

And the reviewer concludes: ‘Pre-20th century Europe is unthinkable without the Habsburgs – as indeed is 20th-century Europe. For on June 28th 1914 a Habsburg named Archduke Franz Ferdinand got into an open-topped car and went for a drive in Sarajevo.’

The review alone makes me want to get back into the bookshops, and makes want to buy and read this book. And reviews like this make me thankful for the family members who renew my subscription to the Economist.

● Martyn Rady, The Habsburgs, Allen Lane; 416 pp, £30; to be published in the US by Basic Books in August; $32.

A Passover story of saving a Haggadah and saving a life

An exhibition in the Sephardic Museum in Córdoba tells the story of how the ‘Sarajevo Haggadah’ was saved (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Patrick Comerford

Passaver or Pesach began last night (8 April 2020), and so this evening I thought it was worth recalling an exhibition I saw in the Sephardic Museum in Córdoba last year telling the extraordinary story of the journey of a unique Sephardic book and the people who saved it.

The Haggadah recalls the Biblical story in the Book Exodus of how the enslaved people in Egypt were led into freedom with Moses. The Sarajevo Haggadah was made in Sefarad or Jewish Spain, possibly in Barcelona, around 1350.

When the Sephardic Jews were expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella, some of them went first to Portugal, and brought with them this Haggadah. From Portugal, the book arrived in Venice in 1609, and its presence is noted at a later stage in Vienna.

The National Museum in Sarajevo, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, bought this book in 1896 from a Sephardic Jew, Joseph Cohen. It soon became the museum’s finest treasure.

The Sarajevo Haggadah is illuminated in silver and gold, and its extraordinary beauty is enhanced by the use of lapis lazuli, azurite and maluquite.

The ‘Haggadah’ recalls the Passover story in the Book Exodus (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Before the Nazi occupation of Sarajevo, a young librarian and curator at the National Museum in Sarajevo, Dervis Korkut (1888-1969), was writing several essays criticising the worrying rise of antisemitism. He was a Muslim and he said antisemitism was alien to the Bosnian traditions of tolerance.

When the Nazis occupied Sarajevo on 16 April 1941, they began a systematic persecution of the city’s Jews, who were mainly of Sephardic descent, as well as Gypsies, Serbs and other ethic and minority groups of people.

They also set out to requisition the Sarajevo Haggadah as an important symbol of Jewish culture and demanded the Haggadah at the Sarajevo museum. However, the librarian Dervis Korkut had concealed the rare volume, hid it in his jacket and left the museum through a back door.

Korkut explained away the missing Sephardic Haggadah, saying a German office had already taken it. Throughout the rest of World War II, the book was kept in hiding in a small town in Bosnia until the end of the Nazi occupation.

Meanwhile, as Dervis Korkut was working at the museum in Sarajevo, he was introduced to Mira Papo, a young Sephardic girl in a desperate search for a hiding place. Her father Salomon Papo, a janitor in the Ministry of the Economy, had been arrested and had been sent with the rest of the family to an extermination camp.

Dervis Korkut took her into his home and told her to use the Muslim name of Amir. When he introduced her to neighbours and the local gossips, he told them she was babysitting his son Munib.

Through his bravado, Dervis Korkut had saved a valuable work of Sephardic Jewish culture, and the life of a young Jewish woman.

When World War II was over, Mira Papo moved to Israel. Dervis Korkut died in 1969, and after his death Mira wrote a letter explaining how she had survived thanks to his bravery. Because of this letter, Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Memorial Centre in Jerusalem, declared Dervis one of the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ – a gentile who had saved a Jewish life during the years of the Holocaust.

Dervis Korkut’s daughter, Lamija, who was living with her husband in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, in 1994, when Serbian militias started to bomb and occupy the region, and began a programme of ‘ethnic cleansing’ that targeted Muslim people in the former Yugoslavia. Lamija and her husband now found they were refugees, and family contacts put them in touch with the Jewish community in Skopje in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia – today’s North Macedonia.

On her arrival, Lamija presented a letter in Hebrew she did not understand to a member of the Jewish community in Skopje. When he read it, he was deeply moved.

Some days later, Lamija and her husband received a letter telling them they had been accepted as refugees in Israel. When they arrived at Tel Aviv Airport, Mira Papo’s son, Davor Bakovic, was waiting to welcome them.

The Talmud says, ‘Whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world.’

‘Whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

The librarian who saved a Sephardic ‘Haggadah’ and a family in Sarajevo

An exhibition in the Sephardic Museum in Córdoba tells the story of how the ‘Sarajevo Haggadah’ was saved (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Patrick Comerford

An exhibition in the Sephardic Museum in Córdoba tells the extraordinary story of the journey of a unique Sephardic book and the people who saved it.

The Haggadah recalls the Biblical story in the Book Exodus of how the enslaved people in Egypt were led into freedom with Moses. The Sarajevo Haggadah was made in Sefarad or Jewish Spain, possibly in Barcelona, around 1350.

When the Sephardic Jews were expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella, some of them went first to Portugal, and brought with them this Haggadah. From Portugal, the book arrived in Venice in 1609, and its presence is noted at a later stage in Vienna.

The National Museum in Sarajevo, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, bought this book in 1896 from a Sephardic Jew, Joseph Cohen. It soon became the museum’s finest treasure.

The Sarajevo Haggadah is illuminated in silver and gold, and its extraordinary beauty is enhanced by the use of lapis lazuli, azurite and maluquite.

The ‘Haggadah’ recalls the Passover story in the Book Exodus (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Before the Nazi occupation of Sarajevo, a young librarian and curator at the National Museum in Sarajevo, Dervis Korkut (1888-1969), was writing several essays criticising the worrying rise of antisemitism. He was a Muslim and he said antisemitism was alien to the Bosnian traditions of tolerance.

When the Nazis occupied Sarajevo on 16 April 1941, they began a systematic persecution of the city’s Jews, who were mainly of Sephardic descent, as well as Gypsies, Serbs and other ethic and minority groups of people.

They also set out to requisition the Sarajevo Haggadah as an important symbol of Jewish culture and demanded the Haggadah at the Sarajevo museum. However, the librarian Dervis Korkut had concealed the rare volume, hid it in his jacket and left the museum through a back door.

Korkut explained away the missing Sephardic Haggadah, saying a German office had already taken it. Throughout the rest of World War II, the book was kept in hiding in a small town in Bosnia until the end of the Nazi occupation.

Meanwhile, as Dervis Korkut was working at the museum in Sarajevo, he was introduced to Mira Papo, a young Sephardic girl in a desperate search for a hiding place. Her father Salomon Papo, a janitor in the Ministry of the Economy, had been arrested and had been sent with the rest of the family to an extermination camp.

Dervis Korkut took her into his home and told her to use the Muslim name of Amir. When he introduced her to neighbours and the local gossips, he told them she was babysitting his son Munib.

Through his bravado, Dervis Korkut had saved a valuable work of Sephardic Jewish culture, and a young Jewish woman.

When World War II was over, Mira Papo moved to Israel. Dervis Korkut died in 1969, and after his death Mira wrote a letter explaining how she had survived thanks to his bravery. Because of this letter, Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Memorial Centre in Jerusalem, declared Dervis one of the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ – a gentile who had saved a Jewish life during the years of the Holocaust.

Dervis Korkut’s daughter, Lamija, who was living with her husband in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, in 1994, when Serbian militias started to bomb and occupy the region, and began a programme of ‘ethnic cleansing’ that targeted Muslim people in the former Yugoslavia. Lamija and her husband now found they were refugees, and family contacts put them in touch with the Jewish community in Skopje in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia – today’s North Macedonia.

On her arrival, Lamija presented a letter in Hebrew she did not understand to a member of the Jewish community in Skopje. When he read it he was deeply moved.

Some days later, Lamija and her husband received a letter telling them they had been accepted as refugees in Israel. When they arrived at Tel Aviv Airport, Mira Papo’s son, Davor Bakovic, was waiting to welcome them.

The Talmud says, ‘Whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world.’

‘Whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)