Alfred H Moses, a former American ambassador to Romania, bought the Codex Sassoon, a leather-bound, handwritten parchment volume containing almost the whole Hebrew Bible.
According to a statement from the auction firm Sotheby’s, Moses purchased the old book on behalf of the American Friends of ANU — Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, where it will be added to the collection.
Prior to the auction, the text was on display at the ANU Museum in March as part of a global tour.
Sotheby’s Judaica specialist Sharon Liberman Mintz said the $38m price tag, which includes the auction house’s fee, “reflects the profound power, influence, and significance of the Hebrew Bible, which is an indispensable pillar of humanity”.
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It is one of the highest prices for a manuscript sold at auction. In 2021, a rare copy of the US Constitution sold for $43m. Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester sold for $31m in 1994, or approximately $60m in today’s dollars.
Mintz said she was ‘absolutely delighted by today’s monumental result and that Codex Sassoon will shortly be making its grand and permanent return to Israel, on display for the world to see’.
Africa Today News, New York reports that the Codex Sassoon is believed to have been fabricated sometime between 880 and 960.
It got its name in 1929 when it was bought by David Solomon Sassoon, the son of an Iraqi Jewish business magnate who filled his London home with his collection of Jewish manuscripts.
Sassoon’s estate was broken up after he died and the biblical codex was sold by Sotheby’s in Zurich in 1978 to the British Rail Pension Fund for about $320,000, or $1.4m in today’s dollars.
The pension fund sold the Codex Sassoon 11 years later to Jacqui Safra, a banker and art collector who bought it in 1989 for $3.19m ($7.7m in today’s dollars). Safra was the seller on Wednesday.