A High Holiday prayer book written in Vienna in 1415, looted by the Nazis in 1938 and restituted in 2023, sold for $6.4 million at Sotheby’s New York in early February, within its $5–7 million estimate, to an online bidder, per JNS (February 5, 2026). Sotheby’s called the result one of the strongest ever achieved for an illuminated Hebrew manuscript.
The mahzor — a festival prayer book for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — was written by a scribe named Moses son of Menachem on roughly 202 folios. Its pages carry burnished gold panels, Gothic archways, dragons, lions, unicorns and parrots, colored with lapis blue, copper green and cinnabar red in a style close to the Lake Constance school. It also records the liturgical customs of Vienna’s Jewish community shortly before its destruction in the persecutions of 1420–21.
The provenance reads like a compressed history of European collecting. The manuscript was bought in Nuremberg in 1842 by the banker Salomon Mayer von Rothschild for 151 gold coins, marked with his coat of arms, and passed into the library of his son Alphonse. It was seized in 1938 when Germany annexed Austria, then sat uncatalogued for decades in the Austrian National Library. Research prompted by the Jewish Museum Vienna’s 2021 exhibition on the Viennese Rothschilds led Austria’s restitution advisory board to recommend returning the book in 2023; the family then consigned it.
Per Smithsonian Magazine (February 23, 2026), Sotheby’s senior Judaica specialist Sharon Liberman Mintz called the book’s six-hundred-year survival “nothing short of a miracle” and said that “rarely does a single manuscript encompass so many worlds at once — faith and artistry, persecution and survival.” She estimated that writing out the text alone took the scribe the better part of a year.
Illuminated Hebrew manuscripts rarely reach the open market; war, expulsion and dispersal thinned their ranks long before the modern trade began. A dated Vienna workshop product with a documented nineteenth-century owner, a Nazi seizure, a museum shelf and a formal restitution is rarer still — which is why a fresh-to-market mahzor could command a price in the territory of institutional acquisitions.
For more context, read Christie’s London Books and Manuscripts Sale Sets a Record.
For more context, read What Are the Dead Sea Scrolls?.
For more context, read notre-dame restoration final phase.