A Man Called Moses Buys a Thousand-Year-Old Hebrew Bible For £30M

One of the oldest surviving biblical manuscripts in the world, a 1,100-year-old Hebrew Bible, was auctioned for 38 million US dollars (£30 million) on Wednesday in New York.

According to a statement from Sotheby’s, former US ambassador to Romania; Alfred H Moses made the purchase on behalf of the American Friends of ANU and donated the Codex Sassoon, a leather-bound, handwritten parchment volume containing a nearly complete Hebrew Bible, to the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv.

Before the auction, the text was on display at the ANU Museum in March as part of a global tour.

The price, which includes the auction house’s commission, “reflects the profound power, influence, and significance of the Hebrew Bible, which is an indispensable pillar of humanity,” according to Sharon Liberman Mintz, an expert in Judaica at Sotheby.

This is one of the highest sums ever paid for a manuscript at auction.

A valuable US Constitution copy sold in 2021 for 43 million dollars (£34 million). The Codex Leicester by Leonardo da Vinci sold in 1994 for 31 million dollars (£25 million), or roughly 60 million dollars (£48 million) in modern currency.

Ms. 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”.

It is thought that the Codex Sassoon was made around the ninth or tenth century.

It received its name when David Solomon Sassoon, the son of an Iraqi Jewish business magnate who furnished his London residence with his collection of Jewish manuscripts, bought it in 1929.

After Mr. Sassoon passed away, his estate was divided, and the biblical codex was sold by Sotheby’s in Zurich to the British Rail Pension Fund in 1978 for around 320,000 dollars (£256,000).

The Codex Sassoon was purchased by banker and art collector Jacqui Safra in 1989 for 3.19 million dollars (£2.5 million), and the pension fund sold it to her 11 years later. On Wednesday, the seller was Mr. Safra.