A near-complete Hebrew Bible from the turn of the 10th century has broken the record for a manuscript sold at auction, fetching $38.1mn from a private buyer at Sotheby’s in New York.
The Codex Sassoon, described by the auction house as “the earliest, most complete” surviving copy of the Jewish sacred text, was written by an unnamed scribe in either Syria or what is now Israel in about AD900. Just 12 leaves, or approximately 15 chapters, are missing from its 792 parchment pages.
It was bought by Alfred Moses, a lawyer who works at Covington & Burling, and who previously served as US ambassador to Romania during the administration of Bill Clinton. He will donate the manuscript to the ANU – Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv.
“It was my mission, realising the historic significance of the Codex Sassoon, to see that it resides in a place with global access to all people,” Moses said in a statement.
The sum fetched for the volume on Wednesday — after a brief bidding war that lasted less than 10 minutes — fell short of the record for a historical document set by billionaire Citadel founder Ken Griffin in 2021, when he paid $43mn for an original printed copy of the US Constitution.
But it eclipsed the previous record for a manuscript, set when Bill Gates paid almost $31mn for Da Vinci’s Codex Leicester in 1994.
There are older extant fragments of the Hebrew Bible, most notably the Dead Sea Scrolls, which date from between the third century BC to the second century AD. But the Codex Sassoon is the oldest known full manuscript of the Tanakh, whose 24 books are foundational texts for Abrahamic faiths and make up the core of what Christians call the Old Testament.
“There is only one other extant early 10th century Bible, which is the Aleppo Codex, now missing 40 per cent of its [original] pages,” said Sharon Liberman Mintz, Sotheby’s senior Judaica specialist.
Estimated to have taken at least a year to write on some 200 sheepskins, the Codex was part of an attempt by scholars to preserve an oral tradition for posterity, by establishing an authoritative text with standardised punctuation, vocalisation and accentuation. “You open up this book from 1,100 years ago and it is still the same [text] that we have today,” Liberman Mintz added.
Arriving at a guide price for the “foundational document of civilisation” presented a challenge for Sotheby’s, the auction house’s global head of books and manuscripts, Richard Austin, said ahead of the sale.
“When you are dealing with something this unique there is no exact comparable . . . the best you can do is come up with something that is close to it in importance,” he added, citing the sales of a 710-year-old copy of the Magna Carta for $21.3mn in 2007, and the Codex Leicester.
The Codex gets its name from David Solomon Sassoon, scion of a wealthy Baghdadi merchant family who is famed for building one of the most important private collections of Judaica during the 1900s. Sassoon paid a Frankfurt-based broker £350 for the Codex in April 1929, just a few months before the Wall Street crash, and helped preserve it by getting it rebound and restored at the British Museum in London.
The manuscript last changed hands in 1989, when Swiss investor Jacqui Safra bought it from the British Rail Pension Fund for just over £2mn at Sotheby’s in London. The fund had acquired the Codex in the late 1970s as part of its attempt to hedge against soaring inflation.
Before going on sale at Sotheby’s on Wednesday, the Codex was on public display in London, Tel Aviv, Dallas, Los Angeles and New York, and attracted more than 25,000 visitors. It was previously digitised by Safra.
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