Rare Jewish prayer book stolen by Nazis to be auctioned in UK

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This year, after spending decades unnoticed on the shelves of a library, the book was returned by Austria to the Rothschild family and will be auctioned at Sotheby’s, in the United Kingdom, in 2026, with an estimated value between 5 and 7 million dollars (approximately 26 and 36.4 million R$, at current prices).

— Illuminated Hebrew manuscripts are extremely rare — said Sharon Liberman Mintz, a specialist in Jewish objects at Sotheby’s, who also links the low supply of these objects to the cost of their production.

— There aren’t many of these books. Whenever Jewish communities were decimated or expelled, they were not always able to take their books with them. Between destruction, upheavals and migrations, the fact that it survived for 600 years is a miracle, she adds.

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.

According to her, it is important that if the work is sold to a private collector, the latter “makes it accessible and visible, at least to the academic community and, ideally, to the general public”.

Little is known about the first 400 years of the mahzor, which will be on display at the New York auction house until next Tuesday, ahead of the February 5 auction. In 1842, Salomon Mayer von Rothschild purchased it for 151 gold coins in Nuremberg, Germany, as a gift for his son, Anselm Salomon von Rothschild. The work 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 stopped at the airport on March 12, while trying to leave the country, and arrested. The Nazis held him hostage for a year while forcing him to legally hand over all his works and fortune.

Alphonse Rothschild and his wife, Clarice, were traveling and in London at the time. During their absence, the Gestapo emptied the contents of their palace in Vienna, confiscating everything, including the mahzor.

Alphonse Rothschild and his family then emigrated to the United States, where he died in 1942.

Many of the best works of art owned by the Rothschilds were sent to Germany. Others have been integrated into Austrian museums. The mahzor and other books were sent directly to the Austrian National Library.

Rescue of works of art

During World War II, the Nazis looted approximately 5 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, the party’s leading ideologue.

After World War II, the Viennese Rothschilds recovered some of their looted property, but only on condition that they donated specific works of art to Austrian museums. They recovered more items 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 only aroused everyone’s curiosity as to how the book ended up in the library. 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, word didn’t spread, Mintz said.

After the exhibition, the Austrian government conducted research into the provenance of the mahzor, and voluntarily agreed, in 2023, to return it to the Rothschild heirs. The book returned to the family in November.