Hebrew Bible Sells for $38.1 Million, Second Most Expensive Document Sold at Auction
The Codex Sassoon, as it is known, is the second most expensive historical document ever auctioned
Sotheby’s sold a roughly 1,100-year-old Hebrew manuscript for $38.1 million on Wednesday, making it the second-most expensive historical document ever auctioned.
The 26-pound book, whose five-inch stack of parchment contains 396 pages, sold following a five-minute battle between two bidders vying mainly over the telephone. The final price, with Sotheby’s fees, fell short of breaking the record currently held by a $43.2 million copy of the U.S. Constitution bought by billionaire Ken Griffin two years ago.
The buyer was the American Friends of the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, who intend the work to be a gift to the museum, Sotheby’s said.
“We wanted it to come home,” said Irina Nevzlin, chair of the museum’s board of directors. Nevzlin said the museum aspired to own the codex after displaying it for a week in March, where it proved an immediate hit with the public.
“This is something that connects us all to our roots and gives us a foundation of who we are—for everybody in the world,” she said.
It topped the $30.8 million paid by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates for a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s scientific notebook known as the Codex Leicester. It also surpassed the $21.3 million paid by Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein for a copy of the 1297 Magna Carta in 2007.
Sotheby’s estimated the Hebrew Bible would sell for between $30 million and $50 million, renaming it the Codex Sassoon in a nod to David Solomon Sassoon, a major Judaica and manuscript collector who bought the work in 1929 for £350, the house said.
After Mr. Sassoon died in 1942, his estate held on to the book until 1978, when it sold the work for around $320,000 to the British Rail Pension Fund. That fund resold the work in 1989 for $3.1 million to a collector who quickly flipped it to its current owner, Jaqui Safra, the billionaire descendant of the Lebanese-Swiss Safra banking family.
Mr. Safra paid researchers to conduct the carbon dating that definitively pegged the book’s origins to the late ninth century or early 10th century, the house said.
The book is said to be from the late ninth century or early 10th century. PHOTO: SOTHEBY’S
Heading into the sale, Sotheby’s said it had high hopes in part because Mr. Safra kept the work largely hidden away, adding to the book’s mysterious allure. The book’s singular place in bibliography also added to its appeal.
Although written long after the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars consider this book to be the earliest and most complete collection of Hebrew writing gathered into a book instead of spread across a scroll. The book contains 24 smaller books that sweep across the Old Testament, better known to Jews as the Tanakh.
Richard Austin, Sotheby’s global head of books and manuscripts, said the tome is comparable to the Aleppo Codex but may be more historically significant simply because it’s more complete. The Aleppo Codex is missing some pages in part because it survived a synagogue fire in 1947.
Among collectors of rare and historic books, the value of a document often depends on what it says—with buying paying premiums for letters or first editions that divulge an author’s intimate thoughts or sentiments. This Hebrew Bible is comparatively straightforward, but its antiquity and completeness may have appealed to collectors of rare books.
That’s not to say it lacked a personal touch: Mr. Austin said its margins remain peppered with entries noting various past owners, from its sale by a man named Khalaf ben Abraham in the early 11th century to its 13th-century dedication to a synagogue in a town called Makisin in northeastern Syria—later allegedly destroyed by the Timurid Empire founder Tamerlane in 1400.