1,100-year-old Hebrew Bible sells for $38m, will head to Israel
One of the world’s oldest surviving Bible manuscripts is placed in the Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv.
An 1,100-year-old Hebrew Bible, one of the world’s oldest extant Bible manuscripts, sold for $38 million in New York on Wednesday.
The Codex Sassoon, a leather-bound, handwritten parchment volume containing a nearly complete Hebrew Bible, was purchased by Alfred H. Moses, a former United States ambassador to Romania.
Moses acquired the ancient text on behalf of the American Friends of ANU – Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, where it will be added to the collection, auction house Sotheby’s said in a statement.
The manuscript went on display at the ANU Museum in March as part of a global pre-auction tour.
Sotheby’s Judaica specialist Sharon Liberman Mintz said the $38 million price tag, including the auction fee, “reflects the great power, influence and significance of the Hebrew Bible, which is an indispensable pillar of humanity.”
It is one of the highest prices for a manuscript sold at auction. In 2021, a rare copy of the US Constitution sold for $43 million. Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester sold for $31 million in 1994, or about $60 million in today’s dollars.
In a historic standalone auction today, the Codex Sassoon, the earliest and most complete Hebrew Bible, sold for $38.1 million during Marquee Week. #SothebysNewYork. #AuctionUpdate pic.twitter.com/Dj3wxLpekf
— Sotheby’s (@Sotheby’s) May 17, 2023
Mintz said she was “absolutely delighted with today’s monumental result and that Codex Sassoon will soon make its grand and permanent return to Israel, on display for the world to see.”
The Codex Sassoon is said to have been manufactured sometime between 880 and 960.
It got its name in 1929 when it was purchased by David Solomon Sassoon, the son of an Iraqi Jewish business magnate who filled his London home with his collection of Jewish manuscripts.
Sassoon’s estate was broken up after his death, and the biblical codex was sold by Sotheby’s in Zurich to the British Rail Pension Fund in 1978 for about $320,000, or $1.4 million in current dollars.
The pension fund sold the Codex Sassoon 11 years later to Jacqui Safra, a banker and art collector who bought it in 1989 for $3.19 million ($7.7 million in today’s dollars). Safra was the seller on Wednesday.