Sotheby’s seeks to sell book for between $30 million and $50 million as historical documents increasingly fetch hefty sums
A 26-pound, weathered manuscript written in Hebrew roughly 1,100 years ago could become the most expensive historical document ever auctioned when Sotheby’s seeks to sell it this spring for between $30 million and $50 million.
The circa 9th-century book with its 396 sheets of parchment stacked five-inches thick would need to sell for more than $43.2 million to top the six-page copy of the U.S. Constitution bought by hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin two years ago. By contrast, the Constitution had a $15 million low estimate, putting the Hebrew Bible’s range far higher.
Sotheby’s thinks the book could break the record because of its historical significance. Although the famed Dead Sea Scrolls are several centuries older, Sotheby’s says this tome is considered by scholars to be the earliest, most complete collection of Hebrew writings bound together into a book rather than written on scrolls. It contains a canon of 24 smaller books, including the Old Testament, and is known to Jews as the Tanakh and more broadly as the Hebrew Bible.
Richard Austin, Sotheby’s global head of books and manuscripts, said this version has “long held a revered and fabled place in the pantheon of surviving historical manuscripts” and ranks on par with the iconic Aleppo Codex, a Hebrew Bible missing pages in part because it survived a synagogue fire in 1947.
The work now for sale has its own share of fateful encounters, its margins peppered with entries noting various past owners, from its sale by a man named Khalaf ben Abraham in the early 11th century to its 13th-century dedication to a synagogue in a town called Makisin in northeastern Syria—later allegedly wiped out by the Timurid Empire founder Tamerlane in 1400.
In traditional collecting circles, the value of a historical document often depends on the significance of what is written, with collectors paying more for letters or first editions that divulge their author’s juicy or revealing sentiments. This Hebrew Bible is comparatively straightforward, but its rarity and dictionary-size heft may appeal to collectors of rare books.
These include Microsoft Corp.’s co-founder Bill Gates, who owns a $30.8 million copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s scientific notebook known as the Codex Leicester. In 2007, Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein paid $21.3 million for a copy of the 1297 Magna Carta.
Sotheby’s has renamed its latest offering the Codex Sassoon, in an attempt to emphasize its importance and likely to give it a marketing boost. The name pays homage to David Solomon Sassoon, a major Judaica and manuscript collector who bought the work in 1929. After he died in 1942, his estate held on to the book until 1978, when it sold the work for around $320,000 to the British Rail Pension Fund.
That fund resold the work in 1989 for $3.1 million to a collector who quickly flipped it to its current owner,………….