London, British Library, Oriental 2598.1

This manuscript was collected by Moses Wilhelm Shapira (1830–1884). He was a dealer of antiquities and manuscripts who sold his goods from a store in the Old City of Jerusalem. He is most known for the controversy over his purported scrolls of Deuteronomy and the fake Moabite pottery created among scholars; at the end of his life, he was publicly disgraced as a fraudster.

The sources of the manuscripts he sold are not clear. In The Athenaeum no. 2855, dated July 15, 1882, Shapira declared that his sources preferred to remain anonymous. He claims to have traveled to Yemen to acquire some of his merchandise. Because of the similarity of Shapira’s manuscripts to those sold by Avraham Firkovitch to St. Petersburg, it has been argued that Shapira too acquired them from the Karaite synagogue in Cairo. (David Sklare, “A Guide to Collections of Karaite Manuscripts”, in Karaite Judaism: A Guide to its History and Literary Sources, ed. M. Polliack, Leiden: Brill, 2003, 893–924 [896]; On the provenance of Shapira's manuscripts, see the introduction in R. Hoerning, Six Karaite Manuscripts, London, 1889, V.) Shapira prepared a catalog, now at Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Ms. or. fol. 1342, of the manuscripts he hoped to sell to institutional libraries. A transcription may be found in the “Heritage data” section.

Shapira sold it to the British Museum (now British Library), London, in 1877–83. Overall, the British Library owns some 200 Karaite manuscripts which can be traced back to Shapira. However, the volumes do not always align with Shapira's catalogue; the librarians of the 19th century rebound and combined incomplete and separate leafs into complete books.

Other libraries where Shapira manuscripts are housed today include: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and the Sutro Library at the California State Library, San Francisco.