Religious and Cultural Coexistence and Conflict
What This Theme Explores
In People of the Book, Religious and Cultural Coexistence and Conflict examines how communities of Jews, Muslims, and Christians alternately nurture and destroy one another’s lives and legacies. The novel asks what allows knowledge, art, and faith to survive when institutions persecute and borders harden: individual conscience or collective policy, private friendships or public orthodoxies. It probes the paradox that the same societies capable of extraordinary collaboration can suddenly turn to erasure and violence. Above all, it argues that culture endures less through official tolerance than through the risky, humane choices of ordinary people.
How It Develops
The story roots coexistence in creation. In 1480 Seville’s fragile convivencia, Zahra bint Ibrahim al-Tarek, a Muslim artist, illuminates a Jewish family’s Haggadah—an act of trust that binds two traditions in shared craft. Her hidden Arabic signature inside a sacred Jewish text fuses identities rather than erasing them, making the book itself a legible archive of cultural interdependence.
That fragile harmony is soon tested and scarred. The 1492 expulsion in “Saltwater” forces Jews to flee or convert, yet Ruti Ben Shoushan defies the state’s decrees by ritually reclaiming her nephew and smuggling the Haggadah into exile—resistance expressed as caretaking. In 1609 Venice, the Inquisition’s censors threaten the book, but Giovanni Domenico Vistorini spares it, revealing the conflict within institutions mirrored in the conflict within a man. Later, 1894 Vienna exposes a corrosive, genteel antisemitism: a bookbinder’s contempt and an assimilated doctor’s precarious standing show how “peaceable” prejudice degrades culture as surely as flames—sometimes with a careless rebinding instead of a bonfire.
The 20th century brings open catastrophe and quiet heroism. In 1940 Sarajevo, Serif Kamal, a Muslim intellectual, hides the Haggadah in a mosque to save a Jewish treasure, even as families like Lola’s are shattered by fascism. Decades later, the book resurfaces during another siege, where Ozren Karaman, a Muslim librarian, risks his life to protect it, embodying a civic identity stronger than sectarian division. The present-day investigation by Hanna Heath braids these episodes together: every forensic trace she uncovers—salt, wine, a wing—reconstitutes a lineage of both brutality and alliance, proving that the Haggadah survives not because history is kind, but because people choose to be.
Key Examples
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The Rescue in Sarajevo (1996): The novel opens with the Haggadah’s survival during the Bosnian War, signaled by a call that celebrates a Muslim saving a Jewish book. That single act reframes Sarajevo—not as a theater of ethnic inevitability—but as a place where individuals can refuse the scripts of violence. It establishes the book as a magnet for courage that crosses confessional lines.
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The Rescue in Sarajevo (1940): Serif Kamal entrusts the Haggadah to a mosque, transforming a house of worship into a sanctuary for another faith’s sacred text. This reversal—Muslim clerics guarding a Jewish book from Christian fascists—condenses the theme into a stark, counterhistorical image: moral kinship outlasts imperial decrees. The rescue also anticipates a later echo, tying generations of guardianship together.
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The Creation in Seville (1480): Zahra’s artistry—sanctioned and cherished within a Jewish household—shows coexistence as collaboration, not mere tolerance. Her quiet Arabic signature in the seder scene writes Muslim presence into Jewish ritual memory, making the book a palimpsest of intertwined identities. Creation becomes the first, most hopeful defiance of future erasure.
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The Censor in Venice (1609): Tasked to destroy, Vistorini instead writes “Revisto per mi,” letting the book live and revealing the Inquisition’s edifice to be permeable to conscience. His choice dramatizes conflict as an interior battle—between role and root, office and origin—expanding the theme beyond interfaith politics into the domain of self. The spared pages become evidence that institutions crack where humanity insists.
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The City of Sarajevo: Once praised as a multiethnic ideal, Sarajevo becomes the novel’s living laboratory of both coexistence and its undoing. Ozren’s reflections on mixed marriages and empty churches expose how civic habits can outpace—or be outpaced by—identity politics. The city’s streets, like the Haggadah’s margins, hold the imprint of both festival and siege.
Character Connections
Agents of coexistence: Ozren Karaman, Serif Kamal, and Zahra bint Ibrahim al-Tarek align not through shared doctrine but through shared ethics—risking status, safety, and freedom to shelter art and life. Each transforms private skill into public guardianship: a librarian’s discretion, a scholar’s prudence, an artist’s meticulous care. Their actions suggest coexistence is not passive “getting along,” but active, often dangerous stewardship.
Victims of conflict: Lola and Ruti Ben Shoushan reveal persecution’s intimate damage—families dismembered, futures narrowed to flight. Yet each also shows how survival depends on cross-cultural aid: a Muslim protector, a clandestine ritual, a smuggled book. In their stories, vulnerability and agency intertwine, redefining “victim” as one who resists obliteration by carrying memory forward.
Embodiments of internal conflict: Giovanni Domenico Vistorini represents the theme’s inward turn, where religious identity becomes a site of fracture and repair. His signature of clemency both betrays his office and affirms a submerged lineage, showing that the fiercest censors sometimes carry the most fragile secrets. The novel suggests that the borders between faiths often run through single souls.
The mediator-investigator: Hanna Heath, a secular expert with an unexpected Jewish inheritance, models how modern inquiry can honor ancient entanglements. Her forensic reading treats material traces as testimonies, translating smudges into stories of hospitality and harm. By reconstructing the Haggadah’s itinerary, she learns that scholarship itself can be an ethic of coexistence.
Symbolic Elements
The Sarajevo Haggadah: A Jewish ritual book made luminous by a Muslim artist, protected by a converso censor, and saved by Muslim librarians, the Haggadah’s body tells the truth of its times. Wine, salt, and an insect’s wing do not just “decorate” the pages; they witness meals, migrations, and moments when hands of different faiths turned pages instead of turning away. As an object, it argues that culture survives as a chain of entrusted care.
Sarajevo: The city mirrors the book—celebrated for pluralism, scarred by siege, and still standing. Its proximity of mosque, synagogue, and church enacts the fantasy of harmony, while snipers’ lines reveal how quickly maps can be redrawn in blood. Like the Haggadah, the city’s endurance is not pristine; it is meaningful because it bears marks.
Contemporary Relevance
Brooks’s vision speaks to a world where nationalism and sectarianism still weaponize identity, yet cross-cultural solidarity remains stubbornly possible. The novel cautions how “normal” prejudice can ripen into catastrophe and how bureaucracies of purity degrade art and life. At the same time, it insists on a counter-archive: librarians who hide books, artists who sign across borders, neighbors who choose custody over complicity. In an age of fractured publics, it asks readers to see preservation—of truth, of beauty—as a civic act that must be practiced, not presumed.
Essential Quote
“How could you possibly have an ethnic war here, in this city, when every second person is the product of a mixed marriage? How to have a religious war in a city where no one ever goes to church? For me, the mosque, it’s like a museum... On its left you see the synagogue and the mosque. On the right the Orthodox church. All the places where none of us go to worship, situated within a very convenient hundred meters of one another.”
This reflection crystallizes the novel’s paradox: a geography of proximity without a guarantee of peace. The catalogue of adjacent sacred spaces evokes an architecture of coexistence that becomes vulnerable the moment identity hardens into ideology. The passage underscores the book’s claim that coexistence is not a static arrangement of buildings or labels, but a daily practice—one that must be chosen, protected, and renewed.