Leningrad Codex

What sets the Leningrad Codex apart from every other early Hebrew Bible is not its beauty, though its sixteen carpet pages of interlaced geometry are among the best surviving Hebrew book decoration. It is that the manuscript tells you about itself. The colophon names the scribe, Samuel ben Jacob. It gives the year, which converts to 1008 or 1009. And it states what he copied from: manuscripts that had been corrected by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher, the last of the Tiberian masoretes and the authority on the vowel points, accents and marginal notes that fix how the Hebrew text is read aloud.

That last statement is what a textual scholar actually needs. A manuscript with no colophon has to be placed by its handwriting and argued about. This one places itself, and it places itself in the line everyone agrees is authoritative, at one remove. It is not a ben Asher manuscript. It is a careful copy of one, and it says so.

The practical consequence is that when the Aleppo Codex, the ben Asher manuscript itself, turned out to be missing two fifths of its leaves, the Leningrad Codex was the only complete alternative of comparable standing. It became the base text of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and of the critical editions that followed, which means that a scholar reading a printed Hebrew Bible today is, in almost every case, reading this book.

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.