For a record price of the equivalent of 35 million euros, a more than 1000-year-old Hebrew Bible has been auctioned. The so-called Codex Sassoon from the late ninth or early tenth century AD fetched a price of 38.1 million dollars, as the auction house Sotheby's announced on Wednesday in New York. This makes it the most expensive handwritten manuscript ever sold at auction.
The Bible was bought at auction by former U.S. diplomat Alfred Moses on behalf of a U.S. non-governmental organization that wants to donate the work to a museum in Tel Aviv.
The Codex Sassoon is largely written in Hebrew, but also contains ancient Greek and Aramaic passages. The book is in an exceptionally good state of preservation, only a few pages are missing. According to Sotheby's, there is no older Hebrew Bible that is so well preserved. The work is named after its most famous owner, the collector David Solomon Sassoon, who died in 1942.
The auction record for a book or document is $43 million. For this price, Sotheby's auctioned an original of the Constitution of the United States of America in November 2021. The buyer of the printed work was the US billionaire and head of the investment firm Citadel, Kenneth Griffin.