Oldest Hebrew Bible, sold for $38 million, will go to the Museum of the Jewish People

A thousand-year-old Hebrew Bible, the oldest known near-complete, was bought at auction Wednesday in New York for $38.1 million by an American philanthropist, who donated it to the Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv.

It took four minutes of auction, "between two determined buyers," at Sotheby's headquarters in Manhattan, to conclude the sale at this record price for a handwritten book, said the auction company.

The record for a historical document, printed or manuscript, was reached in November 2021 with an original copy of the 1787 Constitution of the United States ($43 million).

The Bible was purchased by former U.S. 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 "its world-renowned collection," Sotheby's said in a statement.

The religious book sold Wednesday, which would date from the tenth century AD, or even the end of the ninth century, had been exhibited before the sale in this museum located on the campus of Tel Aviv University.

Israel or Syria

Called Codex Sassoon, named after its best-known owner, David Solomon Sassoon (died 1942), it binds 24 books of the Hebrew Bible from the famous scrolls of the Dead Sea Scrolls dating back to 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.

"The Bible plays a central role for anyone with even a fleeting connection to Western culture and it is the first Bible that has survived history," Orit Shaham Gover, curator of the Museum of the Jewish People, told AFP during her presentation.

According to Sotheby's, the Bible was written around the year 900, in Israel or Syria.

A deed of sale shows that it was sold in the year 1000 and kept in the synagogue of Makisin in northeastern Syria (present-day Markada) until about 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 Sassoon Codex, which has "wandered all sorts of places throughout history," has been presented to the public only once in the past, in 1982, at the British Library in London, said 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 that Syrian city.

The manuscript is also considered to predate the Leningrad Codex, the oldest surviving copy of the text of the Hebrew Bible, and dated to the early 11th century.

The sale took place as part of the traditional spring auction season, which can see the main companies in the sector sell hundreds of works for several billion dollars in a few days, in the upscale neighborhoods of Manhattan.

Sotheby's, owned by French-Israeli media and telecom magnate Patrick Drahi, sold Tuesday night in New York for $ 427 million of paintings, including a Gustav Klimt, "Insel am Attersee", bought by "a Japanese private collector" for $ 53.2 million, or a René Magritte, "The Empire of Lights", for $ 42.3 million.

For its part, Christie's, controlled by the Artemis holding of French billionaire François Pinault, sold for $ 43.5 million a painting by the French post-impressionist painter Henri (Douanier) Rousseau (The Flamingos, 1910), whose works are very rare at auction.