Rothschild Vienna Mahzor sold for almost £5m in near-record for illuminated Hebrew manuscript

The pages offer a brilliant spectacle of lions, dragons, monkeys and other motifs adorning the elegant Hebrew script.

Their rich colour palette is a drawn from rare pigments derived from lapis, copper and cinnabar.

Animals adorn the illuminated pages (Ardon Bar Hama)[Missing Credit]

The style of decoration is distinct to the Lake Constance school tradition emerging in the late 14th century and adopted by Jewish artists working in southern Germany, Switzerland and Austria.

It is one of only a very small number of Hebrew prayer books known to have survived from the medieval era.

Only few years after the creation of the mahzor, in the “Vienna Gesera”, the entire Jewish community in the city was murdered or forced into exile, and the mahzor found its way abroad. Notes in its margins by readers in other lands adapting the prayers to their own traditions form a record of its travels. In 1842, it was bought in Nuremberg by Salomon Mayer von Rothschild, whose family coat of arms and a leaf of dedication were added to the manuscript. In 1938, after the Anschluss, it was among the items stolen by the Nazis from the collection of art and historic artefacts in the Palais Rothschild in Vienna.

The mahzor went to the Austrian National Library but went unrecognised as Nazi-looted property. It was only after it was lent to the Jewish Museum in Vienna for an exhibition in 2021 celebrating the legacy of Rothschilds that it was returned to the family, in 2023. They said at the time: “While the wrongs of the past can never be undone, the restitution of this mahzor carries deep meaning for our family, as it stands as both an acknowledgement of history and a small measure of closure to a pain that has echoed through generations.”

Rothschild family crest with motto "Concordia, Integritas, Industria" ("Harmony, Integrity, Industry") on dedication page[Missing Credit]

Several buyers bid against one another in Sotheby’s New York last Thursday before the hammer came down for $6.4 million (£4.72 million), at the higher end of estimated expectations.

Sotheby’s Senior Specialist in International Judaica, Sharon Liberman Mintz said: “The Rothschild Vienna Mahzor is not only a masterpiece of mediaeval illumination but a document of faith, survival and memory that has endured for more than six centuries.”

In 2021, the Luzzatto Mahzor was sold for $8.3 million at Sotheby’s in a record price for an illuminated Hebrew manuscript.