Medieval European mahzor hoped to sell for £4 million
THE PRAYERS within its pages are the same ones Jews all over the world are singing for this month’s festivals – but this beautifully illuminated volume was inscribed seven centuries ago.
Now the celebrated Luzzatto Mahzor is expected to fetch up to £4m when it goes on sale next month.
Created by a Jewish scribe-artist named Abraham in the late 13th or early 14th century somewhere in Bavaria, the prayer book for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur has had a circuitous journey across Europe over its long history.
Notes written in the margins of its pages document its various different homes as it travelled from Alsace to the Lake Constance region, Northern Italy, and France.
The alterations over the centuries reveal the often turbulent history of the Jews in Europe. One note by a scribe in Constance states that prayers were added in response to violent attacks that broke out blaming the Black Death on Jews, destroying dozens of Ashkenazi communities.
The pages provide an invaluable document of Jewish customs and dress in medieval times. One image shows a shofar being blown just as communities across global Jewry will have heard this week.
The mahzor eventually found its way into the extensive collection of 19th century Italian Jewish scholar Samuel David Luzzatto. In 1870, it was bought by the Paris-based international Jewish organisation Alliance Israelite Universelle (AIU).
Sotheby’s expert Sharon Liberman Mintz said: ‘’This seven-hundredyear-old prayerbook opens fascinating windows onto the lives, rites and rituals of medieval and early modern Ashkenazic Jewry.
“The fact that it was created by a Jewish scribe-artist at a time when many medieval manuscripts were illustrated by Christian artists is especially noteworthy.”
Extolling the “elegant calligraphy” and “beautiful decoration”, she said it is “a splendid, exceedingly rare manuscript worthy of the most important public and private collections worldwide”.
One of only a very few illustrated Hebrew prayer books surviving from medieval times, the mahzor will go on sale at Sotheby’s in New York in October, with the proceeds from its estimated sale price of around £4m going to support AIU’s educational mission.
A fascinating window onto early Ashkenazic Jewry’s rituals