Valmadonna Trust Library

Among the great Hebrew libraries assembled in the twentieth century, few will have left an imprint as profound as the Valmadonna Trust Library. Brought together over more than half a century by a single man, the industrial diamond merchant Jack V. Lunzer, it established itself as the most important private collection of Hebrew books and manuscripts in the world. The Valmadonna Trust Library is a collection of 13,000 printed books and manuscripts in Hebrew or in Hebrew characters, assembled primarily by Jack V. Lunzer, a British dealer in industrial diamonds, born in Antwerp in 1924.

The history of this library is not only that of a man and his passion: it follows the very contours of the Jewish diaspora and the circulation of Hebrew writing, from medieval England to the printing workshops of Venice, from the Italian communities to the Sephardic and Ashkenazi centers of Europe. To possess these volumes is to hold in one's hands the material narrative of a people's transmission across the centuries. Compiled for the most part by the British diamond merchant Jack V. Lunzer, the books and manuscripts trace the spread of Hebrew printing and the worldwide dissemination of Jewish culture.

The present work seeks to retrace the genesis, the zenith, and the ultimate destiny of this collection, from the vision of a collector to its entry, in 2017, into the holdings of the National Library of Israel. It is a history at once intimate — that of an erudite enthusiast — and collective — that of a people and its books.

At the origin of the Valmadonna Trust Library stands a singular figure. Jack V. Lunzer was a British dealer in industrial diamonds, born in Antwerp in 1924. From a Western European Jewish family, trained in the trade of precious stones, Lunzer brought to the field of books the discernment of the connoisseur: a taste for rarity, a sense of material quality, and the patience of an acquirer who waits, sometimes for decades, for the coveted object.

The very name of the collection bears witness to this rootedness in Italian Jewish geography: "Valmadonna" refers to a locality in Piedmont, in northern Italy, chosen as the name of the foundation that would house and protect the library. This choice is not incidental: Italy occupies a central place in the history of Hebrew printing, and it is toward its workshops that a significant part of the collector's ambitions would turn.

Lunzer assembled his library not as a speculative investor, but as a guardian. His approach was one of stewardship: to gather, preserve, and transmit intact a whole whose value lies as much in its coherence as in the rarity of each piece. This philosophy would explain, when the time came, the imperative condition he placed on any transfer: the collection was never to be dismembered. The collection, valued at more than 40 million dollars, was put up for sale in early 2009 by Sotheby's, with the express condition that it be sold as a whole and not dispersed.

The man was also distinguished by a personal attachment to certain pieces, which he pursued with a tenacity that became legendary in bibliophile circles. Lunzer did not merely collect: he battled, negotiated, exchanged, mobilizing his network and his fortune to bring into his library the volumes he deemed essential to the coherence of the whole. His intellectual generosity also showed in the opening of his collection to scholars, making Valmadonna not a sealed strongbox but a living instrument of Jewish scholarship.

The Valmadonna Trust Library is not an undifferentiated accumulation: it traces a genuine map of Hebrew book culture. The books and manuscripts retrace the spread of Hebrew printing and the worldwide dissemination of Jewish culture. This documentary endeavour embraces the great centres of production: Renaissance Italy, Ashkenazi Europe, the Sephardic world, the East and, more rarely, the most distant margins of the diaspora.

Italy holds a place of honour there, which is hardly surprising for a foundation bearing the name of a Piedmontese locality. It was in the peninsula, and notably in Venice, that Hebrew printing experienced its golden age in the sixteenth century. The collection thus brings together major witnesses to this flourishing, among which figure editions that have become absolute landmarks in the history of the Jewish book.

England likewise occupies a particular, and even paradoxical, position in the collection. A country from which the Jews were expelled in the thirteenth century, medieval England left only the faintest written traces in Hebrew. Yet the Valmadonna preserves precisely one of these most precious vestiges, which will be discussed later, making the collection a unique repository of English Jewish memory prior to the expulsion.

This geographical breadth is matched by a remarkable chronological depth, running from the twelfth century down to the modern era. The collection thus encompasses at once the medieval manuscript, the incunabulum, the early modern printed work and later productions, offering a panoramic view over the long span of Hebrew writing. This encyclopaedic ambition sets the Valmadonna apart from specialised collections: it aims for the comprehensiveness of a panorama rather than concentration on a single area or period.

Among the most celebrated episodes in the history of the Valmadonna is the acquisition of an exceptional set of the Babylonian Talmud printed in Venice at the beginning of the sixteenth century. This copy holds an importance that far exceeds its material rarity, for it established, for centuries to come, the canonical layout of the talmudic text. A well-preserved copy of the Babylonian Talmud (1519-1523), conceived by a committee of scholars and codifying many aspects of the Talmud's arrangement, was printed in Venice by Daniel Bomberg.

The work of Daniel Bomberg, a printer of Antwerp origin established in Venice, remains one of the pinnacles in the history of the Jewish book. The arrangement he adopted — the central text surrounded by the commentaries of Rashi and the Tosafists, the reference pagination — became the universal standard, taken up even in contemporary editions. To possess a complete and well-preserved set of this edition was therefore, for a collector, the Grail.

Lunzer's acquisition of this copy constitutes one of the most remarkable transactions in the history of bibliophily. This copy was acquired by Lunzer from the collection of Westminster Abbey in exchange for a nine-hundred-year-old copy of the abbey's original charter, together with endowments, thus fulfilling a twenty-five-year dream. The story has become emblematic: for a quarter of a century, Lunzer coveted the Bomberg Talmud held by the English abbey; he eventually identified, then acquired, the very document likely to interest the institution — a founding charter of its own heritage — in order to offer it in exchange.

This episode perfectly illustrates the Lunzer method: the patience of the diamond merchant, who knows how to wait for the rare stone, combined with the ingenuity of the trader, who turns an obstacle into an opportunity. The exchange was not a mere barter, but a long-matured operation, in which sentimental and historical value prevailed over strict mercantile logic. It sealed the reputation of the Valmadonna as a collection capable of bringing together the unbringable.

If the Bomberg Talmud represents the pinnacle of the printed collection, the Valmadonna's most precious manuscript belongs to an entirely different register, that of medieval English Jewish memory. It is a Hebrew Bible whose historical singularity has no equivalent. A Hebrew Bible from England, known as the Codex Valmadonna I, was copied by hand in 1189 and plundered the following year during the destruction of the Jewish community of York; it is the only known Hebrew text from England predating the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 under King Edward I.

This manuscript links two tragic moments in the Jewish history of England: the massacres that accompanied the accession of Richard the Lionheart in 1189-1190, of which the York pogrom remains the most infamous, and the general expulsion decreed by Edward I in 1290. That this volume should have survived the destruction of the community where it was copied, and then the centuries of exile, confers upon the Codex Valmadonna I an exceptional weight of memory. It constitutes, in itself, an irreplaceable material witness to Jewish existence in England before its brutal interruption.

The collection was not limited to this piece. It contained other manuscripts dating back to the heart of the Middle Ages, illustrating the diversity of scribal schools and textual traditions. A Franco-German Pentateuch, probably written in the tenth or eleventh centuries, also figured in the collection. These manuscripts, by their antiquity and their provenance, document the learned Jewish circles of medieval Europe, where the traditions of reading and transmitting the Bible and its commentaries were forged.

The manuscript portion of the Valmadonna thus offers an indispensable counterpoint to its printed part: before Gutenberg and before Bomberg, it was through manual copying, slow and precious, that the sacred text passed across generations and borders. The simultaneous presence of these two universes — the manuscript and the printed — makes the collection a privileged instrument for grasping the continuity, but also the technical rupture, that the advent of Hebrew printing represented.

At the turn of the 2000s, as he grew older, the question arose of the future of the Valmadonna Trust Library. True to his patrimonial vision, Lunzer wished his collection to remain an indivisible whole and to be entrusted to a great institution capable of ensuring its preservation and access. The collection, estimated at over 40 million dollars, was put up for sale in early 2009 by Sotheby's, with the express condition that it be sold in its entirety and not dispersed.

This indivisibility clause, rare in the market for collections of such value, reflected a moral as much as a scientific requirement: the coherence of the Valmadonna constituted its highest value, greater than the sum of its parts. Lunzer was not seeking personal profit. Lunzer, who did not benefit from the proceeds of the sale, had stated that he wished his library to be acquired by the Library of Congress.

This wish — to see the collection join a great public institution devoted to preservation and study — expresses the disinterested dimension of the undertaking. For Lunzer, the Valmadonna was to pass from the status of a private library to that of a shared heritage, accessible to researchers and a guardian of Jewish memory. The search for the ideal repository proved, however, long and complex: assembling the funding necessary to acquire a collection estimated at several tens of millions of dollars, without dismembering it, required the convergence of an institutional will, a scholarly ambition, and considerable means.

This period of uncertainty, marked by public exhibitions of the collection intended to make its value known, in fact prepared its final destiny. The quest for a lasting home was to find, nearly a decade later, its resolution not across the Atlantic, but in Jerusalem, in the institution that embodies par excellence the preservation of Jewish writing.

The denouement of the Valmadonna Trust Library's story came at the beginning of 2017, when the collection finally found its definitive repository. The National Library of Israel, located in Jerusalem, acquired a collection of more than 13,000 rare and unique Hebrew works, known as the Valmadonna Trust Library, in a private sale arranged by Sotheby's on 18 January.

This choice carries an evident symbolic significance. The National Library of Israel (NLI) constitutes the central repository of Jewish written heritage; the entry into its holdings of the world's finest private Hebrew collection brings to completion a mission of gathering and preservation. The acquisition marks an important addition to the NLI's collection, and the works were to be housed in the institution's new landmark building, designed by the architects Herzog & de Meuron, whose opening to the public was scheduled for 2020.

Thus the Valmadonna was not merely transferred: it was destined to occupy a new setting, commensurate with its importance, at the heart of a renovated institution. Lunzer's original dream — to see his library taken in by a great public institution devoted to study — was being realized, albeit elsewhere than where he had first hoped. In coming to Jerusalem, the collection that traced the worldwide dispersion of the Jewish book recovered, in a sense, a center.

This acquisition closed the cycle opened half a century earlier by an impassioned diamond merchant. The whole remained indivisible, in accordance with the collector's wishes, and the heritage coherence of the Valmadonna was safeguarded. The books and manuscripts, which trace the spread of Hebrew printing and the worldwide dissemination of Jewish culture, mark an important addition to the collection of the National Library of Israel.

The story of the Valmadonna Trust Library is that of an encounter: between a man, Jack V. Lunzer, and the long memory of a people. By bringing together thirteen thousand Hebrew volumes—from the Valmadonna Codex I copied in 1189 to Bomberg's Venetian Talmud, encompassing medieval manuscripts and the printed works of the great centers of the diaspora—the collector built a veritable museum of the Jewish book, spanning eight centuries of writing and transmission.

The coherence of this collection, jealously safeguarded by the clause of indivisibility that Lunzer imposed to the very end, makes it more than a sum of precious pieces: a continuous narrative of Jewish cultural resilience, from the England of medieval massacres to Renaissance Venice, and from a scattered Europe to a rediscovered Jerusalem. Its arrival at the National Library of Israel in 2017 marks not an end, but a metamorphosis: the private library becomes universal heritage, open to scholars and to future generations.

At the close of this journey, the Valmadonna stands as an exemplary witness to what the passion of an individual and fidelity to a vocation can accomplish. Where others would have dispersed, Lunzer gathered; where the market would have fragmented, he demanded unity. It is this unity, now preserved in Jerusalem, that ensures the collection its endurance and its reach: no longer the work of one alone, but the common good of a civilization of the written word.