2023-05-17 22:42:51
Oldest Hebrew Bible sold for $38 million
A thousand-year-old Hebrew Bible was bought at auction on Wednesday in New York by an American philanthropist, who offered it to the Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv.
Called Codex Sassoon, after its best-known owner, David Solomon Sassoon (died 1942), the book binds together 24 books of the Hebrew Bible from the famous Dead Sea Scrolls dating from the 3rd century BCE.
AFP
It took four minutes of bidding, “between two determined buyers”, at Sotheby’s headquarters in Manhattan, to conclude the sale at this record price for a manuscript book, the auction company said. The record for a historic document, printed or handwritten, was reached in November 2021 with an original copy of the 1787 United States Constitution ($43 million).
The Bible was purchased by former American ambassador and philanthropist Alfred Moses and his family, “for the benefit of the American Friends of the ANU-Museum of the Jewish People”, to be donated to this institution and enter “into its renowned collection world,” Sotheby’s said in a statement.
The religious book sold on Wednesday, which is thought to date from the 10th century AD or even the end of the 9th century, had been exhibited before the sale in this museum located on the campus of Tel Aviv University.
Israel or Syria
Called Codex Sassoon, after its best-known owner, David Solomon Sassoon (died 1942), it binds together 24 books of the Hebrew Bible from the famous Dead Sea Scrolls scrolls dating from the 3rd century BCE. It also contains passages in Greek and Aramaic and is in a visibly exceptional state of preservation. Only 12 leaves are missing.
According to Sotheby’s, the Bible was written around the year 900, in Israel or Syria. A bill of sale shows that it was ceded in the year 1000 and kept in the synagogue of Makisin in northeastern Syria (now Markada) until around the year 1400.
Auction season
“The manuscript then disappeared for about 500 years and reappeared in 1929 when it was offered for sale to David Solomon Sassoon, one of the greatest collectors of Hebrew manuscripts,” said Sharon Mintz, a specialist in Judaism texts at Sotheby’s.
The Codex Sassoon, which has “wandered in all sorts of places throughout history”, has only been presented to the public once in the past, in 1982, at the British Library in London, also specified Orit Shaham Gover.
According to carbon-14 dating, the Sassoon Codex is older and more complete than the Aleppo Codex, written in Galilee in the 10th century and brought back to Israel in the 1950s after being found in this Syrian city. The manuscript is also believed to predate the Leningrad Codex, the earliest surviving copy of the Hebrew Bible text in its entirety, and dated to the early 11th century.
The sale took place as part of the traditional spring auction season, which can see major companies selling hundreds of works for billions of dollars in a few days, in the upscale neighborhoods of Manhattan.
Sotheby’s, owned by Franco-Israeli media and telecom magnate Patrick Drahi, sold paintings in New York for $427 million on Tuesday evening, including a Gustav Klimt, “Insel am Attersee”, bought by “a private Japanese collector” for 53.2 million dollars, or a René Magritte, “The Empire of Lights”, for 42.3 million.
For its part, Christie’s, controlled by the Artémis holding company of French billionaire François Pinault, sold for 43.5 million dollars a painting by the French post-Impressionist painter Henri (Douanier) Rousseau (“Les Flamants”, 1910), whose works are very rare at auction.
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