Yoel Finkelman, a former curator of Judaica at Israel's National Library, said that prices for Judaica manuscripts have skyrocketed in recent years, but Sotheby's proposed range is "a different league."įew institutions, and only a small handful of ultrawealthy collectors, could afford such a price tag. Constitution sold in 2021 for $43 million. That honor is currently held by a 1787 copy of the U.S. It also could break the record for the priciest historical document ever sold at public auction. If the target price is realized, the Codex Sassoon could not only eclipse the most expensive Jewish document ever sold - the 2021 sale of the Luzzatto Machzor, a 14th-century prayerbook, for $8.3 million. Jacqui Safra, a banker and art collector, bought it in 1989 for $3.19 million and is now putting it up for auction. The pension fund flipped the Codex Sassoon 11 years later for 10 times its hammer price. Sassoon's estate was broken up after he died and the codex was sold by Sotheby's in Zurich in 1978 to the British Rail Pension Fund, which had started investing in art several years earlier, for around $320,000. Sassoon roved across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa buying up old books, and by his death in 1942, he had amassed over 1,200 manuscripts. "His capacity was astounding, both in terms of number but also in terms of what he was able to find," said Raquel Ukeles, head of collections at Israel's National Library. Its whereabouts for the next 500 years remain uncertain until it resurfaced in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929, and was bought by a legendary collector of Jewish manuscripts whose name it still bears.ĭavid Solomon Sassoon was a Bombay-born son of an Iraqi Jewish business magnate who filled his London home with a massive collection of Jewish manuscripts. It never was rebuilt, but the book survived. Sometime in the following decades, the synagogue was destroyed and the codex entrusted to Salama ibn Abi al-Fakhr until the synagogue was rebuilt. It later migrated east to the town of Makisin in what's today northeast Syria, where it was dedicated to a synagogue in the 13th century. How the Sassoon Codex survived the ages is an epic in its own right.Ī note on the manuscript attest to its owners in centuries past: A man named Khalaf ben Abraham gave it to Isaac ben Ezekiel al-Attar, who gave it to his sons Ezekiel and Maimon. These venerable manuscripts were protected and treasured by Syrian Jewish communities for centuries until the 20th century. "But because it's missing (a third of its pages), in those parts that are absent, there is great significance to this manuscript." The Codex Sassoon's 792 pages make up around 92% of the Hebrew Bible. "The Aleppo Codex is more precise than the Sassoon Codex, there's no doubt," Ofer said. The Codex Sassoon's margins contain an annotation from a later scholar who says he checked its text against the Aleppo Codex - referring to the manuscript by the Arabic title a-Taj, "the Crown." The Aleppo Codex, dated to around 930, has been considered the gold standard of the Masoretic Bibles for around 1,000 years. He said the scribal quality was "surprisingly sloppy" compared to its counterpart. "Any Masoretic scholar in their right mind would take the Aleppo Codex over the Sassoon Codex, without any regret or hesitation," said Kim Phillips, a Bible expert at the Cambridge University Library. Though it's certainly ancient and rare, scholars say the Codex Sassoon doesn't match the pedigree and quality of its contemporary - the Aleppo Codex. "It's so foundational not only for Judaism, but also for world culture." "It's like the emergence of the biblical text as we know it today," Mintz said. The codex's writing style suggests its creator was an unspecified early 10th-century scribe in Egypt or the Levant. Sharon Liberman Mintz, a senior Judaica specialist at Sotheby's, said that radiocarbon dating of the parchment gave an estimated date of 880 to 960. Precisely where and when the Codex Sassoon was made remains uncertain.
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