On 19 October, Sotheby's New York dedicated an auction to the sale of the Luzzatto High Holiday Mahzor, an exceptionally well-preserved Hebrew prayer book and one of the few illustrated of its kind, none of which are privately owned.
The book was written in the late 13th or early 14th centuries in southern Germany. The Hebrew text includes the liturgies for the two highest Jewish feast days, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and the illustrations were carried out by a scribe named Abraham, endowed with calligraphic skill. The commissioning client was a Jewish community in Bavaria.
An important stop that the Luzzatto High Holiday Mahzor then took was the collection of the eminent Italian-Jewish scholar and theologian Samuel David Luzzatto (1800-1865). Five years after his death, the book came into the possession of the Jewish cultural organisation Alliance Israelite Universelle in Paris, the vendor of this Sotheby's sale.
Estimated by Sotheby's at $4-6 million prior to the auction, an American collector placed the winning bid of $8.31 million (£6 mil). This made the Luzzatto High Holiday Mahzor the most expensive Jewish manuscript and the second most-expensive piece of Judaica in auction history.
The record for Judaica was also set at Sotheby's New York, this time in 2015 when the complete Babylonian Talmud (9 volumes) from the first half of the 16th century, printed by Daniel Bomberg in Venice, sold for $9.3 million (£6.1 mil).
