A rare 600-year-old Hebrew prayer book for the Jewish High Holidays, confiscated by the Nazis from the Rothschild family, will be offered for sale next year at Sotheby’s, with an estimated price of $5 million to $7 million. The manuscript was recently reidentified and returned to the Rothschild heirs by the Austrian government.
The machzor, an illuminated handwritten volume created in 1415 by a Jewish scribe and artist, contains about 600 parchment pages. It features elaborate decorations and vivid illustrations, including birds, unicorns and two-headed dragons, framed with silver and gold ornamentation. Sotheby’s specialists say the work took more than a year to produce and is among the rarest surviving examples of illustrated Hebrew manuscripts, both because of the cost and the labor involved in making such books.
The prayer book remained in the Rothschild family for generations until it was looted early in World War II. It vanished from libraries and collections for decades before resurfacing and being formally restituted to the family under Austria’s art restitution process. Sharon Liberman Mintz, a Judaica specialist at Sotheby’s, said the manuscript’s survival across six centuries of upheaval, expulsions and migration of Jewish communities is extraordinary.
Professor Katrin Kogman-Appel, a scholar of Jewish art who examined the volume for Sotheby’s, said any manuscript from this period is rare, and illustrated Hebrew prayer books are rarer still because of the immense expense involved, which meant few were commissioned.
The Sotheby’s auction, scheduled for 2026, is expected to attract collectors and institutions worldwide. The return of the machzor is seen as another milestone in ongoing European efforts to restore Jewish cultural property stolen in the Holocaust, including artworks, books and ritual objects returned in recent years as part of a broader reckoning with historical responsibility.