Judaica seller signs deal with feds to return Nazi-looted 16th-century Bible to Budapest seminary

No, the United States government is not suing a Jewish book, though the title of the legal case might make it seem that way: “United States Of America v. In Re The Chamisa Humshe Torrah (Five Books of Moses) Venice…”

Technically, the book is the defendant in the case — a defendant-in-rem, to use the legal term — but that simply means the government is seizing the book. Rare and collectible, it consists of two different Jewish texts printed in 1589 and 1599 in Venice, Italy, by a man named Giovanni di Gara. The first text is a Hebrew Torah, and the second is a collection of biblical passages known as Haftarot, which are read on Shabbat and holiday mornings as part of Jewish ritual.

Until March 1944, the book was part of the library of the Budapest University of Jewish Studies in Hungary. But then the country was invaded by the Nazis, who turned the university and seminary into a prison and way station for concentration camps. The book, along with much of the library’s collection, disappeared amid the looting of Jewish property following the invasion.

The seminary reopened after the war’s end and has operated continually since, including during the communist era when it was the only rabbinical school in Eastern Europe. Over the decades, books from the collection have occasionally resurfaced, prompting efforts to reclaim the library’s looted property. This particular book appeared in a sale listing on AbeBooks.com with an asking price of about $19,000, and in March 2023, Hungarian officials asked the U.S. government to intervene, according to federal prosecutors.

The telltale sign that the listing represented an authentic lost item from the library’s collection was an image of a stamp on one of the pages. The stamp indicated the book had once belonged to Lelio Della Torre, a 19th-century Italian Jewish scholar and rabbi. Historical records show that when Della Torre died in 1877, the Budapest seminary purchased his collection.

Behind the AbeBooks listing was Meir Turner, a New York rare book seller specializing in Judaica. When contacted by agents from the Department of Homeland Security’s law enforcement division, Turner said he bought the book in the 1980s without knowing it had been looted. He told the agents he was willing to forfeit the book if presented with a legal order. Within a few weeks, the agents returned with a warrant from a federal judge.

The matter became public last week when a federal judge approved an agreement between Turner and prosecutors to return the book to the library in Budapest. Turner has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

He did not respond to an inquiry from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

“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,” said Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, in a statement. “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.”

The return of books looted by the Nazis has accelerated in recent years, especially as the digitization of libraries has made widely available details about individual volumes. Researchers in Poland have been collecting books from the Lublin Yeshiva, a famed house of learning whose library was for a time thought to have been burned by the Nazis. Meanwhile, a London Holocaust research center has launched an effort to enlist amateur detectives in locating and retrieving books that once belonged to the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies in Berlin, shuttered by the Nazis in 1942. So far, they have located 5,000 of the institute’s estimated 60,000 volumes in at least seven countries on four continents.