Antiquities Trafficking Unit - ATU,Budapest,Eötvös József Collegium,Hungary,Manhattan District Attorney,manuscripts,Matthew Bogdanos,Péter Szijjártó,World War II
No comments
From Disappearance to Return: The Long Journey Home of a Stolen 17th-Century Jesuit Manuscript
In 1675, Jesuit scholar Zacharias Traber published Nervus Opticus Sive Tractatus Theoricus in Tres Libros in Vienna, a richly illustrated treatise in three parts—optics, catoptrics, and dioptrics—engraved by copperplate engraver Tobias Sadeler. The work not only explored the science of light, reflection, and refraction, but also recorded unique historical descriptions of the Archbishop’s garden in Bratislava. Issued with two different dedications, only a very few copies of the edition dedicated to Archbishop György Szelepcsényi survive today in Hungarian public collections.
During World War II, one such copy, held in the library of the Eötvös József Collegium in Budapest, is believed to have been illegally removed. For decades, it seems, their loss went unnoticed.
On 21 March 2022, a researcher alerted the Collegium’s library to a possible sighting: a copy of Nervus Opticus matching their missing volume was listed for sale online by a New York antiquarian bookseller for USD 19,500. Reaching out to the bookshop revealed tghat the book had been purchased at a Munich auction in 2007 and that they too were involved in trying to determine the Jesuit manuscript's prior circulation.
Although the Civil Code (Act V of 2013) of Hungarian law, excludes the possession of protected cultural property illegally removed from libraries, it also states that ownership over them can be acquired if a museum document stolen from a library is purchased commercially and in good faith (for example at an auction).
To establish the manuscript’s identity, the ELTE University Library and Archives, the legal successor to the Jesuit college library in Nagyszombat needed to prove their ownership of the object in question.
To do so, when it comes to books and manuscripts, there are several ways in which a library might be able to establish its ownership of a volume. They could look at handwritten possessor entries, the ex libris, which is usually glued to the inside cover of the book. They could look for the manuscript's super ex libris (supralibros) with a coat of arms or monogram placed on the binding of the book, or compare the ownership stamp (stock stamp). In addition thay could look for entries in the Library's inventory book, which might also provide information that could be decisive in ownership issues.
To do so, they requested detailed images from the cooperating book dealer. These in turn revealed a possessor entry (“Colleg. S Jesu, Tyr: 1675”) and some traces of an ownership stamp.
Multispectral imaging then confirmed that a stamp of the Eötvös József Collegium had been deliberately removed, and that the flyleaf and endpaper bearing other ownership marks had been replaced. Archival research traced the manuscript’s history: from Nagyszombat, where the Jesuit college library held seven copies in 1690, to Buda in 1777, leaving one copy behind in a Catholic high school in Pozsony, which eventually entered the Collegium’s library. There it remained until its disappearance, most likely during the 1940s.
In 2025, following further confirmatory investigations conducted by New York authorities, the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office formally seized the manuscript. This being its first step in its formalised return to the Library.
On 23 July 2025, the manuscript Nervus Opticus Sive Tractatus Theoricus in Tres Libros was ceremoniously handed over in New York by Assistant District Attorney Matthew Bogdanos to Péter Szijjártó, Hungary's Foreign Minister. The minister noted that this is the first known case of a stolen Hungarian antiquity being recovered with the direct involvement of the New York District Attorney’s Office, "a gesture he called deeply appreciated and symbolically significant"
For their own part the DA’s office underscored that advanced imaging technology was key to uncovering the removed stamp and proving the manuscript’s origins and rightful ownership, closing an eight-decade chapter in the history of a rare and important scientific work, and restoring it at last to its rightful home.
