The Early Judeo-Persian Manuscripts in the British Library and in the National Library of Russia

Abstract

Abstract This article concerns a textual corpus of nine manuscripts written in Early Judeo-Persian. These manuscripts, which are preserved in the British Library and in the National Library of Russia, contain various exegetical works copied by the same group of scribes during the eleventh-twelfth centuries. This article attempts to demonstrate that these manuscripts were also composed in the same possibly-Karaite intellectual milieu, and not merely copied by the same scribes, using two criteria: similar exegetical explanations of the same biblical passages and the employment of Karaite-Hebrew terminology. Furthermore, the examination of these criteria reveals yet another common feature—the manuscripts’ affinity to the works of the tenth-century Karaite scholar Yefet ben ʿEli, which suggests either reliance on Karaite exegetical works written in Judeo-Arabic or a shared background.