From Cairo to Crimea to the Neva

The codex was written in Cairo and stayed in Egypt through the middle ages, which is the ordinary fate of a Hebrew manuscript made there and no part of why it is famous. Its journey west belongs to the nineteenth century and to one man.

Abraham Firkovich was a Karaite scholar and collector who spent decades gathering Hebrew manuscripts across Crimea, the Caucasus, Egypt and the Levant, sometimes from synagogue storerooms that had not been opened in centuries. What he assembled is still the largest single body of early Hebrew manuscript material to reach Europe, and it is also the reason his name attaches to shelf marks he had nothing to do with writing. The first part of his collection went to Odessa in 1838; the whole passed to the Imperial Public Library in St Petersburg in 1863, where the codex now sits as Firkovich B 19 A.

Firkovich has a mixed reputation, because he altered dates on some colophons to support arguments about Karaite antiquity, and a collector who has done that once invites doubt about everything he handled. The Leningrad Codex is not one of the doubtful cases. Its colophon has been examined repeatedly and its date holds, which is worth stating plainly given the company it was travelling in.