A single large, square parchment leaf with three 22-line columns of an excerpt from the Bible in Hebrew (Zechariah 14:21-Malachi 2:10). The text is written in clear, square script with nikkud, Masorah magna above the text and Masorah parva below the text, and small Masorah inserted between the columns.
 
This page is an example of the earliest extant form of the Hebrew Bible in codex form, of equal or near-equal antiquity to the earliest surviving manuscripts. It is arranged in the oldest known codex format of a nearly square leaf with three columns of text, echoing early papyrus codices. The earliest surviving Hebrew biblical books date to the ninth or tenth century, including the surviving parts of the Aleppo Codex (c. 920, now Jerusalem, Shrine of the Book), the Damascus Pentateuch (c. 1000; also Jerusalem, Hebrew University), the St. Petersberg Codex (dated 1008/09, now National Library of Russia, MS.B19a), British Library, Or.4445 (Pentateuch only, tenth-century), and the near complete ninth- or tenth-century codex, ex D.S. Sassoon, sold in Sotheby’s, 5 December 1989, lot 69, for £2,035,000. This leaf joins these codices as the key records of the format of the text as selected by the Masoretic scholar, Aaron Ben-Asher (d. c. 960), in Tiberias (modern Palestine). Ben-Asher’s text was adopted by Maimonides as the most accurate Bible, and remains in use today.

Professor of Jewish Studies at University College London, Chimen Abramsky (1916-2010), assigned this leaf securely to the same scribe that recorded the tenth-century codex now in the British Library, Or. 4445. As Or.4445 does not feature a eulogistic acronym for Ben-Asher, this suggests that it was written during Ben-Asher’s lifetime. German scholar, Paul E. Kahle has even suggested that Or.4445 was the work of Ben-Asher himself, meaning that the scribe who wrote this leaf was a member of Ben-Asher’s circle during the critical formative stages of the Hebrew Bible. A sister leaf to this example was also in the Schøyen Collection, and sold at Sotheby’s on 10 July 2012.

Exhibited

XVI Congress of the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament, Library of Law Faculty, University of Oslo, 29 July-7 August 1998.

Published

Western Manuscripts and Miniatures, Sotheby’s, London, 18 June 1991, Lot 57 (part).
Doug Powell, Holman QuickSource Guide to Christian Apologetics (Nashville, Tennessee, 2006), p. 189.
Western and Oriental Manuscripts and Miniatures, Bloomsbury Auctions, London, 10 July 2018, Lot 6.

Provenance

Most likely from the famous Cairo Genizah, Ben Ezra Synagogue of Fustat, Cairo.
Sold at: Western Manuscripts and Miniatures, Sotheby’s, London, 18 June 1991, Lot 57 (part).
With Bernard Quaritch Ltd., London, acquired from the above sale.
The Schøyen Collection, Oslo and London, MS. 1630, acquired from the above, November 1992.
Sold at: Western and Oriental Manuscripts and Miniatures, Bloomsbury Auctions, London, 10 July 2018, Lot 6.
Private Collection, Burgess Hill and London, acquired from the above sale.
ALR: S00269393, with IADAA Certificate, this item has been checked against the Interpol database.

Note on the Provenance

The Cairo Genizah is one of the most significant known sources for fragments of early Hebrew manuscripts, second only to the caves of Qu’mran, containing around 300,000 manuscript fragments. The word ‘genizah’ comes from the Hebrew ‘ganaz’, meaning to hide or set aside; from biblical times synagogues were fitted with storerooms for the safekeeping of sacred treasure. It became the practice that any worn out or obsolete copies of the Bible or other manuscripts including the divine name should be buried rather than destroyed. Such books were collected up and stored in a genizah until the burial could take place, often in a local cemetery. The community of Palestinian Rabbanite Jews at Fustat, to the south of Cairo, planned a genizah, where ancient Hebrew manuscripts were being deposited by at least the eleventh century. Ultimately, the internment was never carried out, and the Cairo Genizah was continuously added to in the Ben Ezra Synagogue over the course of centuries, becoming a vast repository of sacred documents and fragments of manuscripts from all parts of the Jewish world, including the Middle East and Spain. The Jews of Fustat preserved almost everything they wrote down, as well as sacred texts, as so many of their writings referenced the holy name. Moreover, they spoke in Arabic but wrote in Hebrew, so may have viewed the alphabet itself as sacred.

The Cairo Genizah gradually fell into disuse, so that by the eighteenth century it was no longer physically accessible. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was rumoured to be home to snakes and demons, before local antiquities dealers gained partial access through renovations to the synagogue in 1891. Linguist Archibald Sayce attempted to acquire the entire collection for the Bodleian Library, Oxford, in 1892, but was ultimately unsuccessful. In 1896, Scottish twin sisters Agnes S. Lewis and Margaret D. Gibson brought fragments from the Genizah to Cambridge, where they showed them to their ‘irrepressibly curious rabbinical friend’ – fellow Cambridge scholar Solomon Schecter. Schechter travelled to Egypt with Charles Taylor, Master of St. John’s College, and obtained the remaining 193,000 fragments for Cambridge University Library (now the Taylor-Schecter Cairo Genizah Collection, the world’s largest and most important single collection of medieval Jewish manuscripts). For half a century these were the oldest Hebrew manuscripts known, and the news of its discovery was greatly exciting. An 1897 letter of Solomon Schecter to the Times described the Genizah as, ‘a battlefield of books, [in which] […] the literary production of many centuries had their share in the battle, and their “dijecta membra” are now strewn over its area’.

Scholars have been able to extrapolate a great amount of information from the Cairo Genizah about the Fustat community and about life for Jews during the Islamic Period in cities such as Baghdad, Damascus, and Aleppo. There is no other record as long or as full.

Dr. Martin Schøyen (b. 31 January 1940) was heir to a Norwegian shipping and transport business, but he also inherited from his father a deep enthusiasm for antiquity and manuscripts. The Schøyen Collection was started by his father, M. O. Schøyen (1896-1962), who gathered around 1,000 volumes of early and later editions of Norwegian and international literature, history, travel, science, and antiquities. Martin’s first acquisition – a manuscript from circa 1300 – was made in 1955, whilst he was still a teenager. By the mid-1980s, Schøyen was well known to auction houses, academics, and dealers as a committed bibliophile, who chose his selections based on scholarship and study of the market. His focus was initially on Biblical and monastic manuscripts, but it soon extended further to encompass the entire history of writing and literary culture around the world and over the course of five millennia. His palaeographic collection is one of the most extensive and wide-ranging ever assembled, containing more than 13,000 manuscripts, with the oldest being almost 5,300 years old. The collection features works from 134 different countries and territories, and represents 120 languages and 185 scripts. Committed to spreading knowledge of his collection, Schøyen has made part of it available online on his website (www.schoyencollection.com) and 34 printed catalogues of entire sections have been published in the Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection series.

Hebrew Masoretic Text