In 1415, a scribe and an artist created a prayer book for the Jewish High Holy Days, an illuminated manuscript in Hebrew filled with illustrations of birds, unicorns, and double-headed dragons that were framed by silver- and gold-leaf decorations to make the pages glimmer.
The rare 15th-century book, known as a mahzor, ultimately came into the possession of the Austrian branch of the Rothschild family, the international banking dynasty, who held onto it until the Nazis confiscated it early in the Holocaust.
Now, after sitting unnoticed on a library shelf for decades, the book has been returned by Austria to the Rothschild family and will be sold at Sotheby’s next year, for an estimated $5 million to $7 million.
“Hebrew illuminated manuscripts are extremely rare,” said Sharon Liberman Mintz, a Judaica specialist at Sotheby’s, “because, to begin with, they are expensive items to create so there aren’t that many of them.”
“Every time Jewish communities were decimated or expelled, they didn’t necessarily get to take their books with them,” she added. “Between destruction, upheaval and migration, the fact that this has survived 600 years is nothing short of a miracle.”
Mintz estimated that creating such a unique work on parchment would have taken more than a year.
“Any book that has survived from that period is a rarity,” said Katrin Kogman-Appel, an expert in medieval manuscripts and a professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Munster, in Germany, who has examined the book for Sotheby’s.
She said it is important that if the work is sold to a private collector it is someone who “would make it accessible and visible to at least the scholarly community, and hopefully the public in general.”
Little is known about the first 400 years of the mahzor, which will be on display at the auction house in New York from Dec. 11 to 16 in advance of the sale on Feb. 5. In 1842, Salomon Mayer von Rothschild bought it for 151 gold pieces in Nuremberg as a gift for his son, Anselm Salomon von Rothschild. It remained in the family for generations, and eventually ended up in the library of Alphonse Rothschild, a World War I cavalry captain and, later, president of the Nathaniel Freiherr von Rothschild Foundation for Mental Illness in Vienna.
During the March 1938 German annexation of Austria known as the Anschluss, the Nazis targeted the wealth of the Vienna branch of the Rothschild family. Baron Louis de Rothschild was stopped at the airport on March 12 as he tried to leave the country, and jailed later in the day. The Nazis held him hostage for a year while they forced him to legally sign away all of his artworks and his fortune.
Alphonse Rothschild and his wife, Clarice, were traveling and in London at the time. While they were gone, the Gestapo emptied the contents of their Vienna palace, confiscating everything, including the mahzor.
Alphonse Rothschild and his family later emigrated to the United States, where he died in 1942.
Many of the best art works the Rothschilds owned were sent to Germany. Others were incorporated into Austrian museums. The mahzor and other books were sent directly to the Austrian National Library.
During World War II, the Nazis looted an estimated five million books from Jewish libraries, museums, archives and private collections across Europe. Some were destroyed while other books deemed special were sent to the Nazi party’s Institute for Research on the Jewish Question in Frankfurt, an antisemitic library established by Alfred Rosenberg, the chief ideologue of the Nazi party.
After World War II, the Vienna Rothschilds regained some of their looted possessions, but only on the condition that they donate specific artworks to Austrian museums. They recovered more after Austrian officials, facing mounting international pressure, changed the country’s restitution laws, leading the government in 1999 to return hundreds of artworks, furniture and jewelry, valued at about $40 million, to the family’s heirs. The heirs later sold many of these works at Christie’s auction house.
But no one seemed to notice Alphonse Rothschild’s books in the national library, and they remained in the stacks for decades. Then, in 2021, the Jewish Museum in Vienna mounted an exhibition devoted to the Viennese branch of the Rothschild family, “The Vienna Rothschilds: A Thriller.” The national library provided the mahzor on loan to the museum for the occasion.
“That just piqued everyone’s curiosity about how the book came into the library,” Mintz said. “The Rothschilds didn’t know it was there. It had been sitting in the library for 60 years and it wasn’t explored or inventoried. Once it had been cataloged, word hadn’t gotten out about it.”
Following the show, the Austrian government conducted provenance research on the mahzor, and voluntarily agreed in 2023 to restitute it to the Rothschild heirs. It was returned to them in November.
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