Treasured Judaica Library, Feared Lost, Is Back On the Market(HT Gerald Rosenberg.)
By Paul Berger (The Forward)
Published May 04, 2011, issue of May 20, 2011.
One of the world’s largest and most valuable private Judaica libraries is up for sale, again.
To the consternation of Judaeophiles and scholarly libraries around the world, public access to the Valmadonna Trust Library — or even knowledge of its whereabouts — was feared to have been lost last December, with the selection of an anonymous buyer in a sealed bid auction conducted by Sotheby’s. Scholars braced for the potential breakup or disappearance of an unparalleled assemblage of rare and historic Jewish books and an incalculable loss to Western culture. Libraries rued its loss, perhaps forever, as a potential acquisition.
But the sale of the collection, the Forward has learned, never went through.
“It’s sitting a few feet from me right now,” said David Redden, a Sotheby’s vice-chairman, in an April 29 interview. Redden, who led the sale in New York, said that an anonymous bidder had met or exceeded the $25 million minimum set by the library’s trustees. But Jack Lunzer, who amassed the collection, told the Forward that the trustees had aborted the sale because the buyer failed to meet two stipulations for purchase: that the library be kept whole and be made available to scholars.
The library has been sitting in Sotheby’s New York offices ever since.
[...]
The centerpiece of his library is a 16th-century Babylonian Talmud that was coaxed out of the collection of Westminster Abbey, where it had lain for about 400 years. The Talmud was published by Daniel Bomberg, a Christian printer who was the first to publish a complete edition. The Abbey refused repeated attempts by Lunzer over a period of 25 years to buy the books. In 1980, Lunzer spotted an opening: A New York collector needed to unload the original charter of Westminster Abbey. Lunzer bought the charter and used it as a bargaining chip to persuade, some might say blackmail, the Abbey into letting the Talmud go.
[...]
Previous posts on the Valmadonna Library sale are here, here, here, and here.
Tangentially related topic: U.S. looking at Chabad-Russia feud over texts (JTA). The dispute between Chabad and Russia over the Schneerson Collection has now led to US exhibition cancellations and is attracting the interest of the State Department. Background on that is here.
