Stolen by Nazis, 15th-century Jewish prayer book could be sold at auction for $5 million

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This rare 15th-century book, known as the Machzor, ended up in the hands of the Austrian branch of the Rothschild family, the international banking dynasty, who kept it until it was confiscated by the Nazis at the start of the Holocaust.

Today, after being forgotten on library shelves for decades, the book has been returned by Austria to the Rothschild family and will be auctioned next year at Sotheby’s, for an estimated sale of between $5 million and $7 million.

“Illuminated Hebrew manuscripts are extremely rare,” explains Sharon Liberman Mintz, Judaica specialist at Sotheby’s. — First of all, they are very expensive to produce, so they do not exist in large numbers. Whenever Jewish communities were decimated or expelled, they could not always take their books with them. Between destruction, displacements and migrations, the fact that it has survived 600 years is a miracle.

Mintz estimated that creating such a unique work on parchment would have taken over a year.

“Any book that survives from this period is rare,” said Katrin Kogman-Appel, an expert on medieval manuscripts and professor of Jewish studies at the University of Münster in Germany, who reviewed the book for Sotheby’s.

She added that it is important that if the work is sold to a private collector, it is to someone who “makes it accessible and visible, at least to the academic community and, ideally, also to the general public.”

Little is known about the first 400 years of the Machzor, which is on display from yesterday until next Tuesday at the New York auction house, ahead of the auction scheduled for February 5. In 1842, Salomon Mayer von Rothschild bought it in Nuremberg for 151 gold coins as a gift for his son Anselm Salomon von Rothschild. It remained in the family for generations and ended up in the library of Alphonse Rothschild, a cavalry captain in World War I and later president of the Nathaniel Freiherr von Rothschild Foundation for Mental Illness in Vienna.

During Germany’s annexation of Austria in March 1938, known as the Anschluss, the Nazis targeted the wealth of the Viennese branch of the Rothschild family. Baron Louis de Rothschild was arrested at the airport on March 12 while trying to leave the country, and imprisoned the same day. The Nazis held him hostage for a year, forcing him to legally hand over all his works and fortune.

Alphonse Rothschild and his wife Clarice were then traveling in London. During their absence, the Gestapo emptied his palace in Vienna, confiscating everything, including the Machzor. Alphonse Rothschild and his family then emigrated to the United States, where he died in 1942.

Many of the Rothschilds’ most important works of art were sent to Germany. Others have been integrated into Austrian museums. The Machzor and other books were sent directly to the Austrian National Library.

During World War II, the Nazis looted approximately five million books from Jewish libraries, museums, archives and private collections across Europe. Some were destroyed, while others, considered special, were sent to the Nazi Party’s Institute for Research on the Jewish Question in Frankfurt, an anti-Semitic library founded by Alfred Rosenberg, a leading Nazi ideologue.

After World War II, the Rothschilds of Vienna recovered some of the stolen goods, but only on condition that they donated specific works of art to Austrian museums. Other assets were recovered after Austrian authorities, facing growing international pressure, changed the country’s restitution laws, leading the government in 1999 to return hundreds of works of art, furniture and jewelry, worth about $40 million, to the family’s heirs. The heirs then sold several of these works at Christie’s auction house.

But no one seemed to notice Alphonse Rothschild’s books at the National Library, and they remained on the shelves for decades. Then, in 2021, the Jewish Museum in Vienna organized an exhibition dedicated to the Viennese branch of the Rothschild family, entitled “The Rothschilds of Vienna: A Thriller”. The national library loaned the Mahzor to the museum for the occasion.

— This aroused everyone’s curiosity as to how the book ended up in the library — Mintz said. — The Rothschilds didn’t know he was there. It remained in the library for 60 years without being examined or inventoried. After it was cataloged, the news did not spread.