Alfred Moses bought the Codex Sassoon for more than $30 million - he just saw it for the first time

(JTA) - On Wednesday morning, Alfred Moses, 94, sat in a small white armchair at a round wooden table in a Manhattan office building as a historian gingerly turned the pages of a more than 1,000-year-old book in front of him.

Two weeks earlier, Moses had paid a record-setting sum for the book - more than $38 million in total. But this was the first time he had ever seen it.

The book was the Codex Sassoon, the world's oldest nearly-complete copy of the Hebrew Bible, and Moses had purchased it on behalf of the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv. That morning, in Sotheby's Upper East Sid...