Top Estimate $50 Million: Sotheby’s To Auction The 10th-Century Hebrew Bible Known As The Codex Sassoon

The renowned late-19th and early 20th-century collector of Hebraica and Judaica David Solomon (Suleiman) Sassoon, born in Baghdad in 1880, led a lifelong quest across the Middle East to build the ultimate religious library, whose codices and incunabula provide the world with a crucial, largely medieval view of the origins of what are called the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The “Ohel Dawid,” Sassoon’s catalogue of his stunning collection, is the record of his life’s work, and one lodestone in that catalogue is what’s known as “Sassoon 1053,” or more commonly as the Sassoon Codex, one of the most complete Hebrew bibles in existence. Sotheby’s has announced its auction in its May sale. The Codex is being put under the hammer by the well-known Swiss investor and film producer Jacqui (Jacob) Eli Safra, under whose ownership the manuscript was formally dated to the 10th century.

It’s hard to overstate the provenance of the Codex Sassoon, which is one good reason that the manuscript heads into Sotheby’s May sale with the highest auction estimate of any book or manuscript in the world to date. The corollary to that is also crucial to the price it will bring: It’s hard to overstate the debt that scholars of religion and the literary world in general owe to David Solomon Sassoon. Sassoon, scion of the prominent Baghdad Jewish family and grandson of the renowned cotton trader David Sassoon of Baghdad and Mumbai, realized early in his life that the medieval record of the founding of Judaism, both in the codices and in the incunabula, lay strewn in Jewish communities across North Africa and the Middle East, with some of the treasure well-kept but with a high quotient of it in great danger of disappearing.

Sassoon’s quest led him far and wide: Beginning with his own collecting in Baghdad, through Morrocco, Turkey, Yemen, and Syria he was able to amass, by 1915, some five hundred manuscripts. By 1932, when he issued the Owhel Dawid, the collection had more than doubled to encompass some 1200 works. He got the Farhi Bible from Aleppo, Syria, said to have been transcribed in France in late 14th century, and he snag the Damascus Pentateuch codex (from Damascus) in 1915. Among the collection was, also, a hand-written copy of Maimonedes’ own very wittily-entitled Guide for the Perplexed, which Sassoon acquired in Yemen but which had been transcribed in Spain in 1397.

Sassoon died in 1942, in the days before offshore trusts came into such vogue as they now enjoy as tax vehicles. To settle British estate taxes some of the now-renowned collection began to be auctioned off and/or donated to British institutions between 1975 and the mid-1990s, which is how the British Library acquired its chunk of Sassoon manuscripts and the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem got the Damascus Pentateuch. The University of Toronto holds the family’s remainder of the collection.

It’s the wholeness of the medieval Codex Sassoon that best expresses its rarity and historical value. Comprised of three sections — the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and the Writings — it’s the closest thing we have in book form to what’s colloquially called the Old Testament.