Sold to the highest bidder: whose manuscript is it anyway?

Not in Heaven · Mar 1, 2026 · 42m

A handwritten letter by a Jewish luminary of the 18th century, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, also known as the Ramchal, hit the auction block earlier this year. The event grabbed headlines both because of the nearly $400,000 US sale price, but also because, until recently, many believed that the letter was safely among the hundreds of other handwritten pages that make up the Ramchal collection at The Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS).

JTS had quietly sold off a number of valuable books and manuscripts from their collection in private sales a decade ago. Over the years, scholars have decried the…