Codex Sassoon, the oldest Hebrew Bible, up for auction: worth between 30 and 50 million dollars

Sotheby’s will auction the oldest surviving and nearly complete Hebrew Bible, known as the Codex Sassoon, on May 16 in New York. The approximately 1,100-year-old volume, dated to the late 9th or early 10th century, is estimated at $30 million to $50 million, which could make it the most valuable historical document ever sold at auction. The Codex is named after businessman, philanthropist and collector David Solomon Sassoon, who once owned it.

According to Sotheby’s, this book predates the first fully complete Hebrew Bible, the Leningrad Codex, by nearly a century. The Aleppo Codex, held in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, is older than the Sassoon Codex, but nearly two-fifths of its pages are missing. “The Sassoon Codex has long held a revered and legendary place in the pantheon of historical documents and is undeniably one of the most important and unique texts in human history,” said Richard Austin, head of the Books and Manuscripts Department at Sotheby’s.

The Codex Sassoon contains Masoretic notes by early medieval scholars on how words from the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Bible should be written, read, and accented. The Sassoon Codex also contains more than a millennium of annotations, transcriptions, commentaries and proprietary records. According to Sotheby’s, the latter provides even more detail on how Abrahamic religions developed and spread in the ancient Levant area in the Middle Ages. To calculate Codex Sassoon’s estimated price, Austin said an expert committee began discussing the figure two years ago. He took into consideration the cost of producing over 100 animal skins, the careful handwriting of a single writer, and its monumental historical value. He also factored in two previous record sales of historical documents: the Leicester Codex, a Leonardo da Vinci manuscript purchased by Bill Gates in 1994 for $30.8 million. Billionaire and Top 200 art collector Ken Griffin broke the record in November 2021 when he paid $43.2 million for a first printing of the United States Constitution.

The current owner of Codex Sassoon is Jacob (Jacqui) Safra, heir to a Syrian-Lebanese-Swiss banking fortune. The last time Codex Sassoon was on public display was in 1982 at the British Museum in London. But now Sotheby’s will soon take the Codex Sassoon on tour to London, the Anu Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, Dallas, Los Angeles and New York.