Multispectral imaging to recover lost text in the Sarajevo Haggadah

Over the last two decades, multispectral imaging (MSI) has established itself as the most important tool in recovering illegible text in erased or damaged manuscripts, and to a lesser extent as an aid to the codicological study of manuscript supports and media. Rarely, however, have spectral imaging initiatives involved Hebrew illuminated manuscripts. In 2022, an international team of scholars, imaging scientists, and conservators from the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Lazarus Project of the University of Rochester imaged the Sarajevo Haggadah multispectrally. Produced for a Jewish commissioner and housed at the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, this 14th-century illuminated manuscript contains, inter alia, a partially erased text of a sale contract on folio 106v* that is now newly legible. Codicological details of the manuscript – ink, stains, type of animal used for parchment – have also benefitted from material analysis via MSI. Herein, we describe the MSI process of the Sarajevo Haggadah and the application of image processing algorithms to recover the erased text on folio 106v*. A complete text of a sale contract is revealed for the first time, providing significant information about the ownership and provenance of the Sarajevo Haggadah at the beginning of the 16th century.