2023-05-17 21:47:37
The oldest nearly complete Hebrew Bible, known as the Codex Sassoon, dating back to about 1,100 years ago (it dates to the late 9th or early 10th century), was auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York tonight for 38,126,000 dollars (35,170,000 euros). The precious manuscript was put up for sale by Swiss financier and collector Jacob (Jacqui) Safra, heir to a Syrian-Lebanese-Swiss banking fortune, which he had owned since 1989.
The manuscript was purchased at auction, after a bidding process that lasted just under ten minutes, by Alfred Moses, a lawyer who works at Covington & Burling and who was previously the US ambassador to Romania during the the administration of President Bill Clinton. Moses will donate the Codex Sassoon to the Anu Museum – Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv. “It was my mission to realize the historic significance of the Codex Sassoon and to have it kept in a place accessible to all,” Moses said in a statement.
This Bible set a new record: it became the most valuable manuscript codex ever sold at auction worldwide, ousting Leonardo da Vinci’s Leicester Codex purchased by Bill Gates in 1994 for $30.8 million. However, the amount achieved by Codex Sassoon falls short of the record for an all-time historical document set by collector Ken Griffin in 2021, when he paid $43 million for an original printed copy of the United States Constitution.
The Bible sold for the record price includes all 24 books of the Jewish Holy Scriptures, minus about a dozen leaves, including the first 10 chapters of Genesis. Of the 792 parchment pages, only about 15 chapters in total are missing.
The Manuscript Bible is named after businessman, philanthropist, and collector of Hebrew manuscripts David Solomon Sassoon, its former owner. According to Sotheby’s, the copy predates the first fully complete Hebrew Bible, the Leningrad Codex, by almost a century. The Aleppo Codex, preserved in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, is older than the Sassoon Codex but nearly two-fifths of its pages are missing.
The Codex Sassoon contains Masoretic notes by early medieval scholars on how words from the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible should be written, read, and accented. It also contains more than a millennium of annotations, transcripts, comments and proprietary records.
(by Paolo Martini)
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