The oldest Jewish bible sold at auction for $38 mln

The oldest known nearly complete Hebrew Bible has been sold at auction by the Sotheby's auction house for $38.1 million. This is one of the highest prices for a book or historical document ever sold at auction.

The New York Times writes about it.

The Codex Sassoon dates back to the ninth to tenth century. It includes all 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, with only eight leaves missing, including the first 10 sections of the Book of Genesis.

Since 1989, the codex has belonged to Swiss collector and financier Jacqui Safra. The estimated value of the Bible was 30-50 million dollars.

The auction house said the buyer was the Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv. The purchase was made through a donation from Alfred H. Moses, the former US ambassador to Romania, and his family. The book will be donated to the museum and become part of its permanent collection.

The Bible, one of only two complete or nearly complete Hebrew Bibles of the period known to have survived, was made in present-day Israel or Syria. It contains what is known as the Masoretic text, after the Masoretes, a lineage of scholar-scribes who lived in Palestine and Babylonia from about the sixth to the ninth century and who created annotation systems so that the text could be read and understood, and conveyed correctly.

The book also includes several inscriptions tracing the change in ownership over the centuries. The earliest of these is a deed of sale, dated around 1000 AD, indicating that it was sold by Khalaf ben Abraham, a businessman working in Palestine and Syria, to Isaac ben Ezekiel el-Attar, who eventually passed it on to his sons.

Another inscription notes that almost 200 years later it was dedicated to a synagogue in the northeastern Syrian city of Maqisin. After the synagogue was destroyed, the book was given to a man named Salama bin Abi al-Fahr, who was to return it when the synagogue was rebuilt.

However, the synagogue was not rebuilt. And what happened to the Bible from then until 1929, when scholar-collector David Solomon Sassoon bought it, is unclear.

The Codex Sassoon was last sold at auction in 1989 for $3.19 million (almost $8 million in today's dollars) to a dealer who subsequently sold it to Saphra for an unknown price.

Even in its day, the book was an expensive item and required the skin of over 100 animals to create some 400 parchment sheets. The text was written by a single scribe. The publication notes that the price of $38.1 million may not seem high compared to the prices often set at art auctions. But for books and historical documents, such a price is rarely set.

For many years, the record price held by the Codex Leicester, a manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci, bought by Bill Gates in 1994 for $30.8 million ($62.4 million converted). In November 2021, there was a new record holder: $43.2 million paid by investor Ken Griffin for the first edition of the US Constitution.