National Library of Russia

The National Library of Russia was founded in 1795 under Catherine the Great as the Imperial Public Library, part of a wave of Enlightenment-era state library building across Europe, and it grew over the following century into one of the largest book and manuscript collections in the world. Its holdings gained an unusual and historically significant dimension through the activity of Abraham Firkovich, a nineteenth century Crimean Karaite scholar and collector who travelled extensively across the Russian Empire, the Caucasus and the Middle East acquiring old Hebrew manuscripts, many from synagogue genizot, storage rooms where worn sacred texts were traditionally kept rather than destroyed.

Firkovich sold his collection to the Imperial Public Library in stages during the 1860s and 1870s, giving the library, almost by historical accident rather than deliberate Judaic studies planning, one of the most important assemblages of medieval Hebrew Bible manuscripts anywhere, the Firkovich Collection. The Leningrad Codex is its single most significant item, though Firkovich's own manuscript dating claims for parts of his wider collection were later shown to include forgeries and alterations, a fact that has made scholars careful to evaluate each Firkovich-collection manuscript, including the Leningrad Codex, on its own independently verified merits rather than on Firkovich's say-so.

Because Firkovich is documented to have altered or misdated some manuscripts in his collection to bolster his own theories about Karaite antiquity, any object connected to him invites scrutiny, and the Leningrad Codex has received exactly that scrutiny more thoroughly than most. Unlike some of Firkovich's more doubtful attributions, the codex carries its own internal colophon, a scribal note stating it was copied and corrected by Samuel ben Jacob in Fustat, old Cairo, and completed in 1008 or 1009 CE, a date that fits comfortably with its script, Masoretic annotation style and codicological features as independently assessed by modern paleographers, largely removing it from the more general doubt attached to Firkovich's collecting practices elsewhere.

The library's custodianship today is therefore relatively uncomplicated by comparison with several other entries in this atlas: the codex's authenticity as an early eleventh century manuscript is not seriously disputed, and the controversy that does attach to the wider Firkovich Collection concerns other items and Firkovich's own scholarly claims rather than this particular manuscript's date or origin. The library preserves it as a working scholarly resource, its text underlying most modern critical editions of the Hebrew Bible.