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The earliest book containing a date which the scholars do not doubt at all is the biblical book of the Latter Prophets, rewritten somewhere in the Middle East in the year 916 C.E.
Later, I'll be glad to show you its final page containing a colophone, i.e., the scribe's testimony when he finished rewriting it.
This is basic scientific knowledge found today in the beginning of any textbook on the history of books.
Take a textbook (had there been any) from 1976, 1979, or 1980, and you will find quite a different statement.
It will say that the oldest manuscript containing indirect indication of the date it was produced is another text of the Prophets,
stored at the former Asian Museum or the Leningrad department of the Inst. of Oriental Studies, now known as the Inst. of Oriental Manuscripts in St. Petersburg, where I have the honor of working.
What is this book and why is it dated this way? Because it contains an ownership inscription, i.e., the first exlibris recorded in Jewish literature.
I showed you this page on purpose.
It contains no colophone, but has a very curious text which is very hard to read today; in fact, I've been working on it for the past two weeks.
Essentially, it says: "I, Saeed ben Eibat (quite a special name), have inherited this very large and resplendent manuscript of the Latter Prophets (listed), when my brothers and I divided the property of my late father."
This tells us that the book was indeed expensive and worth including in the division of property, but this is obvious as it is a large, heavy, beautifully scripted codex of parchment.
The inscription goes on to say that the owner "received this book without any argument on the part of my brothers, peacefully."
The very cozy and cute inscription in fact tells us nothing of the book's date or location, the name Saeed being the only indication that it was somewhere in the Middle East, rather than, say, Mainz, Germany.
Below, however, there is another, even less legible, inscription, which says something more interesting.
Our Saeed's financial position seems to have changed, and the inscription says in similar language: "I, Saeed ben Eibat, am selling this famous codex containing prophets as listed, in the presence of witnesses such-and-such, to Yitzhak something-or-other."
What matters to us here is that the inscription contains a clearly visible date: 4248, or in plain words, 847 C.E.
So according to this note, by the year 847 C.E. he has already had it for some time and is selling it, which was probably not the same day he got it. The father, too, probably didn't pass away the very same day the book was written.
From this scholars have concluded that by the time it was sold, the manuscript must have been approximately 50 years old, or at any rate, definitely made before 847 C.E.
This is unique evidence. We had no other evidence of such ancient books existing.
On that basis, this was considered the oldest known Jewish manuscript which was possible to date. I repeat, date indirectly, for want of a colophone, but decently, as we know the year it was sold.
This is how it went right up until the Perestroika.
The book was presented to guests of honour, described nicely in English as the oldest, and studied by respectable scholars, e.g. renowned philologist and book historian Klavdiya Starkova, who wrote a paper on the book because it was so ancient.
Come the Perestroika, the collections of the Russian State Library were opened. I've spoken about it before, suffice it to say that it was found to contain 10 times as many pre-12th century manuscripts as all the other libraries in the world combined.
This particular layer of the collection was studied quite quickly and extensively.
After such deep polygraphic, codicological, and other analysis what used to seem vaguely suspicious turned out to be impossible.
There was no way that the manuscript could have belonged to the early 9th century.
There are clear indications that they didn't write this way until the 11th century.
As I've said, the book was stored at the Institute of Oriental Studies, whose collections had not been through the hands of that famous forger of Jewish history and manuscripts, Abraham Firkovitch.
I have told you in a previous lecture how he swindled four, or, by now, eight generations of people by his various additions and date changes, and really changed history.
This manuscript, however, hadn't been his, and seems kosher. It came to the Institute from the collection of Daniil Khvolson, a famous scholar who died in 1910.
I'm not sure how viable this technique would be nowadays, but in the 19th and early 20th century it was quite popular to sell one's library on the condition that it will stay in one's home until one dies.
Several great Jewish bibliographers did so, including the greatest, Maurice Steinschneider, who sold his books about 40 years prior to his death and lived happily off the interest, sharing his books with nobody.
Khvolson, too, had sold his collection to the Asian Museum in advance, and it ended up there after his death.
I have been quite interested in this story, because, a) I am in charge of these books, b) as a paleographer, I know full well that the book couldn't have belonged to the 9th century, and c) since these inscriptions had been read and recorded, nobody has bothered to read them again.
So I unearthed the tome and began researching its history and the way it came to be in Khvolson's collection. I discovered that it was the famous Codex of Qarasuvbazar.
Qarasuvbazar is a place in the Crimea, known now, I believe, as Bilohirsk. I imagine that today it is this middle of nowhere.
But in the mid-19th century it was a large Crimean center of rabbinic Judaism, whose famous ancient synagogue our Firkovitch pillaged and robbed of all their manuscripts.
So it turns out Firkovitch did hold the manuscript, and then gave it to Mr. Khvolson to analyze.
Now we can understand more of what happened.
There is, in fact, this well-legible ownership inscription, recording that Saeed inherited the book from his father.
It is written in normal medieval Talmudic Hebrew with such expressions as "ve-lo lear'er" etc., which are widely used document cliches.
The handwriting is well visible, and without a serious investigation I would estimate it at the 13th or early 14th century.
So he wrote it in all honesty much later.
When the forger laid his hands on the manuscript, what he did was add another inscription to this one. This second addition was made by the forger in the 19th century.
Imitating the language of the first note, listing all the prophets etc., he indirectly introduced the date of the book's purchase.
The entire note is barely legible, the letters are half-worn off, and only the date is perfectly visible, because that is all he really needed here to sell the forgery.
He had no idea that one day paleography would develop into a real science and we would know that nobody could have used such cursive in the 9th century even if they tried.
This is a fine example of the way forgery of what in essence is an exlibris, the first ownership note, misled scholars.
The trouble being not that we're particularly set on the 9th century, but that Bible scholars had studied the masora, the style, etc. of this particular text on the basis of it being the oldest,
while in fact it is quite ordinary, and we have plenty manuscripts of the same time.
So, an example of the power such seemingly innocent things as medieval exlibrises can have over history.