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| By: Associated Press |
| Published: August 6, 2006 |
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It's an art lover's triangle, pitting France and a London-based auction house against a Brooklyn art dealer -- over a Jewish manuscript created eight centuries ago.
The dispute involves a 13th century Torah that is believed to have been stolen from France's Bibliotheque National, that nation's biggest, government-run library.
Christie's auction house sold the centuries-old manuscript and five other scrolls to Brooklyn antiquities dealer Yosef Goldman at a New York auction six years ago.
France sued Goldman, demanding its return. In July, Goldman sued Christie's in Brooklyn Supreme Court, saying the auction house should not have allowed the work to be sold.
On Saturday, Christie's auction house defended its conduct, saying it did not know the item was stolen when it agreed to auction it.
"We believe his suit has no merit, and we will follow up in court," Christie's spokesman, Toby Usnik, told The Associated Press.
Goldman is asking for a refund of the $358,000 he paid for the manuscript, according to his attorney, Nathaniel Lewin.
The dealer also alleged that Christie's is being slow in helping to return the Torah to France.
All Christie's wants, spokesman Usnik said on Saturday, is "to work with the Bibliotheque Nationale to ensure the return of the manuscript to the library."
According to its suit, the French government obtained the 13th-century religious manuscript in 1668. It is unclear when it vanished from the National Library of France. The book, known as "Hebrew 52" among art experts, may have been damaged and altered during the theft.
A former chief curator of the French library's Hebrew manuscripts, Michel Garel, has been convicted and fined in the theft of the book. He is appealing that ruling.
In 2005, library officials said they discovered that about 30,000 books and documents were missing during an inventory.
The dispute over the manuscript is only one example of the kind of scrutiny facing artwork entering the United States.
Globally, the black-market trade in antiquities has forced curators to spend months tracking down ownership records and verifying that documents are legitimate.
Those efforts have brought U.S. acquisition of antiquities to a trickle because of the need to prove that objects were not stolen. |
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