A bookseller in New York has agreed to return a 16th-century Hebrew Bible, which was for sale for $19,000, to the Budapest Jewish school from which the volume was taken illegally, the U.S. Justice Department stated on Monday.
“With this forfeiture, a small but meaningful piece of the history of the Jewish faith will be returned to its rightful owner, the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary,” stated Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.
The book is a Chumash (the Five Books of Moses) with Haftorah texts, weekly readings from Prophets and Writings that are read on Shabbat and festivals. The Jewish Theological Seminary of the University of Jewish Studies in Budapest, Hungary, did not deaccession the text, which Giovanni di Gara printed in 1588 and 1589.
“The Di Gara Text went missing for nearly 80 years after it was looted from the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary during the city’s occupation by Nazi forces in 1944,” Williams stated. “We may never know how it ended up in the Southern District of New York, but it is now returning home.”
Per the agreement between the Justice Department and the unnamed seller, the book bears a stamp indicating that it comes from the 19th-century Italian rabbi and scholar Lelio Della Torre. Several years after the rabbi died around 1871, his collection was sold to the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary, and the book in question is published in an 1872 catalog of the collection, which the seminary owns, per the Justice Department.
“In 1944, in the midst of World War II and the Jewish Holocaust, Nazi forces invaded Budapest and seized and occupied the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary, looting its holdings,” the Justice Department stated. “The Di Gara text is believed to have disappeared during this period. At no point did the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary deaccession—that is, formally remove from its collection—the Di Gara text.”
Hungarian officials told the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in March 2023 that a Manhattan-based vendor was apparently selling the volume on AbeBooks for $19,000. The vendor told Homeland Security later that month that he acquired the volume in the 1980s “without knowledge of its provenance” and said he would turn it over to Homeland Security “if served with valid legal process,” per the Justice Department.
Homeland Security agents served the vendor with a seizure warrant in April 2023, and the vendor forfeited the volume voluntarily, per an Oct. 4, 2024 judge’s order.
