Jack V. Lunzer

Jack V. Lunzer (born in 1924) is a retired industrial diamond merchant and the creator and custodian of the Valmadonna Trust Library.

Biography

Jack Valmadonna Lunzer was born in Antwerp in 1924, where his British father was working as a diamond dealer for De Beers. He is related to the scholar Liepman Philip Prins (1835-1915), and his grandfather, Julius, was the founding president of the Adath Yisroel Synagogue in London. He moved to London as a child, where he was educated, and worked during World War II in a Spitfire engine factory making diamond tools. He began to work under his father but disliked working for De Beers, so he established his own firm, Industrial Diamond Company, exploiting the niche market for industrial diamonds, took over his father's dealer business in 1949 and later expanded into mining. By the 1980s, his company had annual sales of $100 million.^[1] In 1948, Lunzer married Ruth Zippel,^[2] the Italian-born daughter of a Polish merchant. Her father had a collection of Hebrew books that she and Lunzer took to London.^[1] Lunzer has five adult daughters: Margaret, Myra, Fiona, Alison and Caroline.^[3] Ruth Lunzer died in 1978. The daughters are the beneficiaries of the Valmadonna Trust.^[1]

Lunzer began investing in racehorses, but by the 1950s, he had turned to collecting rare Hebrew books. Over the next six decades, he created the collection of 13,000 books and manuscripts held by the Valmadonna Trust Library.^[1] It is named after Valmadonna, a small town near Alessandria in north-west Italy where Lunzer's friends lived and his wife’s family had ties. By purchasing the deed to the town, Lunzer became the Count of Valmadonna.^[4] The collection encompasses works from throughout the world, particularly Italy, where Hebrew printing began, and covers four and a half centuries of typography. Many items in the collection are rare or unique, among them some of the earliest Hebrew printed books.^[5][6] The collection was exhibited in February 2009 by Sotheby's, which continues to seek a buyer.^[7] After visiting the exhibition of the collection at Sotheby's, a scholar from the Drisha Institute wrote of Lunzer's achievement:

The morning of our visit, I studied the commentary of Rabbi David Kimhi, who is known as the Radak, on Joseph's conflict with his brothers. Honestly, it felt like just another of the many rabbinic commentaries... Then I went to the Valmadonna. Peering closely at one of the oldest manuscripts, I saw that it was a volume of Psalms with the Radak's commentary. In that instant, time and space collapsed as I found myself bound to every other Jew who has studied Kimhi's work since it was penned in the late 12th and early 13th centuries. That moment made clear to me that I am not simply a modern Jew studying in a contemporary yeshiva near Lincoln Center. I am tied to every other Jew through 800 years of history. I envision Kimhi hunched over his work, and wonder if his soul knows that even still we are learning from him, that his elucidation remains as relevant to the study of biblical text as it was to his contemporaries. The books of the Valmadonna – the books of our people – bring history alive [and] keep our history alive even when the communities that produce them are long dead.^[8]

Lunzer lives in Hampstead Garden Suburb, London, where he had held the collection in his home. Since 1982, the librarian for the collection has been Mrs Pauline Malkiel.^[1]

In 2015 Sotheby's New York presided over the sale of the Daniel Bomberg Babylonian Talmud (1519-1523) from the Valmadonna Trust for $9.3 million, the copy that Lunzer obtained in trade from Westminster Abbey in 1980.^[9]

References

External links

• Video about Lunzer and the collection