1,000-Year-Old Hebrew Bible To Be Displayed At UES Gallery

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — The Silk Stocking District is becoming the rare manuscript district as Sotheby’s prepares to put up the rarest Hebrew Bible, and perhaps the most expensive book ever, on public display at their York Avenue gallery.

The super rare, 1,100-year-old Codex Sassoon, the earliest and most complete Hebrew Bible ever discovered, will be on display starting May 6.

Last weekend, the neighborhood saw a $7.5 million ultra-rare Shakespeare folio get plucked up at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair inside the Park Avenue Armory.

But old Bill's got nothing compared to the Codex Sassoon, which the esteemed auction house says could fetch between $30-50 million during its auction later this month, anticipated to be one of the biggest auctions in recent history.

The 400-page codex contains nearly all of the Hebrew Bible, plus many notes and annotations from its thousand-year journey, and is named after its most prominent modern owner, London collector David Solomon Sassoon, who purchased it in 1929 for £350.

An unknown scribe penned the bible around the year 900 in modern day Syria or Israel, according to the auction house. Inscriptions tell the story of its provenance up to around 1400. The rare book then disappeared until it joined Sassoon's collection of rare Judaica almost 600 years later.

At the last auction of the Codex Sassoon in 1989, it sold for $3.19 million at Sotheby’s London to noted Swiss collector Jacqui Safra who owns it to this day.

Currently the most expensive document sold at auction was the 2021 Sotheby’s sale of a first-edition copy of the United States Constitution, which sold for $43.2 million.

To see a foundational piece of history for yourself before it it goes up for auction, you can make an appointment for a viewing between May 7 -16 here.