One of the most important manuscripts of the Hebrew Scriptures has been sold at auction in New York for $6.9million (£5.3million) – and it will now be made available for public viewing.

After a bidding battle at Sotheby’s, the 14th-century Shem Tov Bible was sold to an unnamed buyer on the telephone, The Guardian reports.  The Bible is said to be one of the most important Jewish religious texts in private hands and was copied by Rabbi Shem Tov ben Abraham Ibn Gaon, a Spanish religious scholar and writer in 1312. It is richly illuminated with illustrations and delicate penwork combining Christian and Islamic ornamental motifs, all executed by a Jewish artist.

Sharon Liberman Mintz, Sotheby’s international senior Judaica specialist for books and manuscripts said “the level of exactitude and amount of Jewish learning invested in its production are likely unparalleled by any other medieval Jewish biblical manuscript. The Shem Tov Bible thus stands today as an extraordinary monument to the most influential and powerful Jewish civilization of the High Middle Ages.”


She said the 800-page Bible’s mix of three different artistic and architectural traditions made it unique:

“This was written in Christian Spain in 1312, but the Christians and the Jews are living with all this Islamicate mudéjar [Moorish] architecture and they’re seeing all of the cultural aesthetics of Islamic Spain around them still…

“The book melds and employs all three artistic expressions: you see the Jewish scribal penmanship in the artwork; the delicate flourishes of purple and red ink work marking off the different parts of the Bible.”

The Bible has been bought by private individuals who Liberman Mintz says now look forward to making it available to the public:

“I think anybody who purchases a book of this magnitude understands that it needs to be made available to the widest audience possible and is not going to bury it in some small library.”