ART AND CULTURE.
The oldest extant Hebrew Bible sold at auction in New York
Sotheby's auction house in New York sold the world's oldest extant almost complete Hebrew Bible, dating from the 10th century, for $38,126,000 (€35,170,000).
The priceless manuscript had been auctioned by financier and collector Jacob (Jacqui) Safra, and was purchased by Alfred Moses, a lawyer working at Covington & Burling, who in turn will donate it to the museum in Tel Aviv, Israel.
This is a record amount spent on a manuscript, but is still less than the highest amount ever spent on a historical document.
The oldest extant Hebrew Bible sold at auction in New York
Sotheby's auction house in New York sold the oldest almost complete Hebrew Bible in the world, dating from the 10th century, for $38,126,000 (€35,170,000).
Oldest extant Hebrew Bible sold at auction in New York City
This Bible is more special than the others because it includes all 24 books of the Hebrew Scriptures. Only about 15 chapters are missing from the total 792 pages of parchment. This document predates the first entirely complete Hebrew Bible, the Leningrad Codex, by about a century.
Oldest extant Hebrew Bible sold at auction in New York City
The official name of this document is Codex Sassoon. Specifically, it appears to have been written by a scribe (whose name is unknown) in Syria or what is now called Israel, around 900 AD. The name comes from the businessman, philanthropist and collector of Hebrew manuscripts David Solomon Sassoon, who owned the manuscript earlier.
Oldest extant Hebrew Bible sold at auction in New York City
The Bible, auctioned at Sotheby's in New York, had been put up for sale by financier and collector Jacob (Jacqui) Safra, heir to a Syrian-Lebanese-Swiss banking fortune, who had owned the manuscript since 1989. It was Alfred Moses, a lawyer with the firm Covington & Burling who also served as US ambassador to Romania under Bill Clinton, who won it after a ten-minute bidding war. Moses said he would donate the document to the Anu Museum - Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv.
Oldest extant Hebrew Bible sold at auction in New York City
"It was my mission to recover the work, realise the historical importance of the Codex Sassoon and ensure that it was kept in a place accessible to all. The Hebrew Bible is the most influential book in history and is the foundation of Western civilisation. I rejoice in knowing that it belongs to the Jewish people,' the words of the new owner of the document.
Oldest extant Hebrew Bible sold at auction in New York City
The price paid for Codex Sassoon - $38,126,000 (€35,170,000) - is the highest price ever paid for a manuscript, surpassing the $30.8 million Bill Gates shelled out in 1994 for Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Leicester. However, it does not exceed the record amount spent on a historical document. That record goes to collector Ken Griffin in 2021, who shelled out a whopping $43 million for an original printed copy of the US Constitution.
Oldest extant Hebrew Bible sold at auction in New York City
The Codex Sassoon is also important because it contains Masoretic notes by early medieval scholars on how words should be written, read and accented. Moreover, the Codex Sassoon is the oldest known complete manuscript of the Tanakh, whose 24 books are fundamental texts for the Abrahamic faith and also represent the true Christian Old Testament.
Nature
22/09/2023
Climate change is presenting us with greater and different challenges than ever before. In fact, the lack of rainfall and snowfall is pushing the world towards water shortages. Of course, we are not only talking about drinking water, which is used to quench our thirst, but also the water needed for energy plants and agriculture.
Some of our behaviors in fact, still linked to the old habits of abundance of our parents, are totally detrimental to the environment, as well as useless for practical purposes. Of course, there is a lack of proper environmental culture in schools in the first place, and that is where we step in.
In this little guide, we want to give you 10 quick tips on how to save water in everyday life.
science
20/09/2023
It often happens, especially during adolescence, that one realizes that one is more gifted in languages than in mathematics, or vice versa. Or that one's thought processes are different from those of a friend or classmate. This aspect depends not only on personal interests, but also on the way our brains work.
In fact, the way to process information is different from person to person, but it can be grouped into some predefined categories. Some are more predisposed to creative work, others to relationships with other people, and still others can hear and understand music in a way unthinkable for others.
According to a study carried out since the 1980s by the American psychologist Howard Gardner, we have as many as nine different types of intelligence, to which the tenth would be added. These intelligences could also theoretically be linked to certain types of jobs.
Art galleries private collections
19/09/2023
Food has undoubtedly been of paramount importance in the development of our modern civilization. Food in particular made our bodies stronger and helped extend the average lifespan of early humans by many decades.
The ability to create particular foods and dishes, in short, to process food, is still valued today, and, interestingly, many of the things that are the basis of our meals go back to ideas far into the past. Bread, wine, beer, oil, cheese, so many things go back even thousands of years.
In this short article, we will take you along with us to discover the origins of our most common foods.
Tablet computers and tech gadgets
science
17/09/2023
The Six Degrees of Separation Theory, which assumes that each person can be connected to any other in the world through a chain of knowledge with no more than five intermediaries, is one of the most popular and suggestive social theories ever created, and may still be valid today in the age of social networking.
It was in the mid-1960s when a Harvard professor sent a letter to an unknown farmer in Nebraska, hoping that, through a completely random network of contacts, the letter would reach its true recipient in Boston.
Today, a study co-ordinated by the Institute of Complex Systems of the National Research Council in Florence (CNR-Isc) - signed by researchers from Spain, Israel, Russia, Slovenia and Chile - has shown that connections on social networks resemble those found by Milgram in the 1960s.
Art galleries private collections