‘Manchester Garage Haggadah’ sells for £210,000
A liturgical work found in an Osem soup carton in a small northern England town massively outstrips its estimate
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A forgotten 18th-century Passover seder liturgical book discovered in an Osem soup carton in a small town near Manchester sold at auction for £210,000 ($340,000) Friday morning.
In a two-way suspenseful bid-off at the Adam Partridge Antiques auction room in Macclesfield, the rare Viennese haggadah hugely outstripped its original estimate of £100,000-£150,000.
The story behind the discovery of the haggadah is even more extraordinary than the sum it fetched.
At the owner’s invitation, William Forrest, an antiques expert at Adam Partridge Antiques, took a tour of a Bury, Manchester, residence. Finding nothing remarkable, he was set to go, but was encouraged to enter the garage, where he was handed an old Osem soup carton filled with Hebrew books.
“Is there anything you can do with these?” he was asked by the homeowner.
Though he does not have a background in Hebrew manuscripts, Forrest said, he immediately knew he was holding something special.
An inscription was found inside the hand-painted haggadah, reading: No 47 Exposition du Alvert Hall (a reference to a catalog listing at the Anglo-Jewish Exhibition at the Albert Hall in 1887); Written 5486 – 1726; Written by Aaron son of Benjamin Woolf for Mendel Oppenheim.
Later the rare goatskin vellum book was dated to 1725, and seems to have been written and illuminated by Aaron Wolf ben Benjamin Zeev Schreiber Herlingen of Gewitsch. While holding an official position at the Imperial Library in Vienna, Herlingen was also a scribe and illustrator for Jewish works.
The anonymous buyer is reportedly from Vienna.
This isn’t the first time a haggadah has exceeded expectations. A similar haggadah illuminated by the same illustrator from the Cornelius J Hauck Collection, when listed in a 2006 Christie’s sale in New York, sold for an unexpected $408,000, though it was estimated to sell for $100,000 to $150,000.
The anonymous Bury owner was present in the hall Friday and, according to auctioneer Adam Partridge, “She did a great job of showing absolutely no reaction and remained completely poker-faced.”
His colleague Forrest, who first discovered the haggadah’s importance, said, “I do not think… that she really took on board the potential outcome when we first made the find.”
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