Samuel ben Jacob

I. A Scribe Known from His Books

Medieval Hebrew Bible codices seldom name the people who made them, and when they do, the name is usually all that survives. Samuel ben Jacob is an exception only in degree. No chronicle, letter or commentary describes him, and his birth, death and family are unknown. What survives is his work: the codex now in the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg, catalogued as Firkovich Hebrew I B19a, several other biblical manuscripts that modern scholars have attributed to his hand, and one Judaeo-Arabic contract found among the papers of the Cairo Genizah.¹ A page about him is therefore a page about the evidence of his craft, and the account that follows keeps the description of the codex itself, its contents and its modern history, to the minimum needed, since these are treated on the hub page on the Leningrad Codex.

That evidence is unusually rich. Samuel signed the Leningrad Codex in several places, he dated it in a long colophon, and he left enough distinctive habits in the layout of his Masoretic notes for later scholars to recognise his hand in fragments that carry no name. Taken together, these sources allow a portrait of a working scribe of the early eleventh century, though not a portrait of the man himself, and the illustrations on this page accordingly show his materials and setting rather than an imagined face.

II. The Colophon and Its Dates

The long colophon of the codex states that this complete Bible was written, furnished with vowel points and Masorah, and carefully checked in Medinat Miṣrayim. Ben Outhwaite of the Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge has pointed out that this phrase denotes Fustat, the old city that remained the administrative and cultural centre of Egyptian Jewry after the Fatimids founded Cairo nearby, rather than Cairo itself, as several published translations have it.¹ The colophon then gives the date in five systems of reckoning: the month of Sivan in the year 4770 from the Creation, the year 1444 of the exile of King Jehoiachin, the year 1319 of the Seleucid era, the year 940 from the destruction of the Second Temple, and the year 399 of the Hijra. These do not agree exactly. They correspond to 1010, 1011, 1008, about 1008–1009 and 1008–1009 respectively, so that most of them point to 1008–1009 while the era of Creation points to 1010.¹

Published descriptions differ on several details of this colophon, and a reader comparing them should be aware of the differences. One widely used reference account gives the month of completion as Iyar rather than Sivan and places the colophon at the end of the manuscript, whereas Outhwaite, working from the facsimile, locates the long colophon on folio 1 recto and reads Sivan.²¹ Outhwaite also notes that the use of five dating systems, including the era of Jehoiachin's exile, is characteristic of Karaite documents in the Genizah. He regards the patron, Mevorakh ben Joseph, as certainly a Karaite, but considers the evidence insufficient to decide whether Samuel himself was one.¹ The colophon further states that the codex was corrected according to the books prepared by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher, the Tiberian Masorete whose work is described on the page on Aaron ben Asher and his family.²

III. The Carpet Pages and the Signature

The Leningrad Codex is decorated with sixteen carpet pages, most of them gathered at the end of the manuscript after the biblical text. These full-page designs combine geometric ornament with lines of minute script, the technique of Masoretic micrography described in the journal essay on biblical micrography and the Masorah figurata.² Samuel's name appears among them in plain text, in verse and in micrographic form. In the centre of the carpet page on folio 479 recto, a dedication in carefully spaced letters reads, in Outhwaite's translation, ‘Samuel ben Jacob wrote, vocalised and furnished with masora this codex of the Bible’, with two of the words abbreviated to fit the space reserved for it; folio 474 recto begins ‘I, Samuel ben Jacob’.¹

These signatures matter because they settle a question that cannot be settled for many other codices: the consonants, the vowel signs, the accents and the Masoretic notes were all the work of one man. In the Aleppo Codex, by contrast, the consonants are attributed to Shlomo ben Buya'a and the pointing and Masorah to Aaron ben Asher, a division of labour between a sofer and a nakdan that was common in the period.³ Outhwaite understands a further micrographic inscription, in which Samuel says that he ‘inscribed’ the work for Mevorakh, as a claim to the micrographic decoration as well, though he allows that the painted ornament of the carpet pages may have been executed by another hand.¹

IV. Fidelity to the Ben Asher Text

The modern reputation of the Leningrad Codex rests on its closeness to the text of the Aleppo Codex, the manuscript traditionally associated with Aaron ben Asher himself. That closeness is real but not complete. Kim Phillips of Tyndale House, Cambridge, citing the counts of Mordechai Breuer, notes that the Leningrad Codex differs from the Aleppo Codex in 135 places in the Former Prophets, compared with 160 for another early codex of those books, most of them in vowel signs, accents and other small marks rather than in consonantal wording.⁴ Many places in the manuscript show erasures and corrections, consistent with the colophon's statement that the copy was revised against Ben Asher's books after it was first written.²

The most discussed peculiarity of the codex is its irregular marking of dagesh and rafe, the signs that distinguish hard and soft pronunciations of certain consonants. Older descriptions tended to treat these irregularities as evidence of careless pointing. Aron Dotan argued instead that the omissions of dagesh follow definable patterns and are not random, an argument cited by Phillips, which suggests that Samuel was reproducing a tradition of pointing rather than failing to apply a rule; specialists do not all draw the same conclusion from the evidence.⁴ The Masoretic notes show a different kind of independence. Because the Tiberian Masorah was never fixed in a single authorised form, each scribe selected and arranged notes for his own manuscript, and Samuel's selection is his own.⁵

V. A Professional Copyist

The best evidence for Samuel's standing comes from outside his codices. Among the Genizah papers in Cambridge University Library is a Judaeo-Arabic legal agreement, T-S 10J5.15, dated 1021, in which Samuel ben Jacob undertook to copy the eight books of the Prophets and the Writings, including the vocalisation and the Masorah, in his usual manner. His fee was to be twenty-five dinars, a very large sum. The exemplar he was to copy was a manuscript he had made himself, then in the possession of Abraham ben Haggai, a well-known administrator of the Jewish charitable foundations of Fustat.¹

The document shows that by 1021, a little more than a decade after he completed the Leningrad Codex, Samuel was a scribe whose services were contracted in the same way as other skilled work, under the supervision of communal officials, and whose earlier copies served as exemplars for new ones. Outhwaite suggests that the fee for the Leningrad Codex, earlier in his career, was probably lower, though it was still a prestigious commission from a wealthy patron.¹ Copying for pay in this way places Samuel among the professional soferim of the Genizah world, whose work was valued as much for its accuracy as for its appearance; the Jewish Encyclopedia's older article on the Masorah gives the background of the notes that he was paid to supply.⁶

VI. Other Manuscripts from His Hand

Since the late twentieth century, comparison of script, layout and especially of the Masoretic notes has led scholars to attribute further manuscripts to Samuel ben Jacob. Phillips lists a Torah codex with an unusually large proportion of Babylonian Masorah in its Masorah magna, which Mordechai Breuer edited in 1992 in the series of the Manfred and Anne Lehmann Foundation; a second Torah codex accompanied by the Arabic translation of Saadia Gaon, whose Masorah includes entries drawn from Menaḥem ben Saruq's dictionary; several Genizah fragments of the Torah; and a codex of the Former Prophets that the American scholar Richard Gottheil saw in the Karaite synagogue in Cairo by 1905, whose first-person colophon, now lost, was recorded at the time.⁴ Phillips himself identified a further codex of the Former Prophets, now divided between two classmarks in St Petersburg, which is laid out in three columns of seventeen lines in a written area of about 27 by 28 centimetres, considerably larger than the 27-line columns of the Leningrad Codex.⁴

Two further studies have refined the method. Phillips showed that two Genizah fragments of the Torah share their Masorah magna, note for note, with one of Samuel's Torah codices, and that Samuel took care never to let a Masoretic note run from one block of notes into another, choosing notes to fit the space available.⁵ In 2024 Vincent Beiler argued in Textus that a Torah codex now scattered across ten classmarks, nine in St Petersburg and one in Jerusalem, is also from Samuel's hand.⁷ Attributions without a colophon rest on the accumulation of such features rather than on a signature, and the scholars who propose them present them as probable rather than certain. Even with that caution, the emerging picture is of a scribe who produced several complete or partial Bibles for the Jewish communities of Fustat over a career of at least a decade.

VII. From Fustat to St Petersburg

Outhwaite observes that the Leningrad Codex is not itself a Genizah manuscript: it was never discarded, but passed intact through a succession of owners whose notes of sale and dedication are recorded in the codex.¹ In the nineteenth century it came into the possession of the Karaite collector Abraham Firkovich, whose collections are described in the journal essay on the scribe of Chufut-Kale. The date at which the Imperial Public Library acquired it is given variously as 1862 and 1863, even within a single reference account, and the sources consulted for this page do not resolve the difference.²

In the twentieth century Paul Kahle chose the codex as the base of the third edition of Kittel's Biblia Hebraica, and it has remained the base text of its successors, the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and the Biblia Hebraica Quinta.¹ The journal essay on the Leningrad Codex during the siege of Leningrad follows the manuscript through the Second World War. Outhwaite remarks that the introduction to the Stuttgart edition, which thanks everyone from printers to spouses, does not mention the scribe whose manuscript it reproduces.¹

VIII. Reading His Work Today

Readers who cannot consult the manuscript have two kinds of access to it. A complete photographic facsimile is available at the Internet Archive, alongside the printed facsimile volume edited by David Noel Freedman and his colleagues in 1998, and allows the carpet pages, the colophon and the layout of the Masorah to be studied directly.⁸ The consonants, vowels and accents of the codex are also available as a diplomatic electronic text, the Westminster Leningrad Codex, now maintained as the Unicode/XML Leningrad Codex, whose history is told in the journal essay From Vellum to Unicode.⁹

Both forms of access remove something. The electronic text preserves the letters and signs but not the page, and the facsimile preserves the page but not the colour and texture of the parchment. Phillips's and Outhwaite's work shows why the page matters: the arrangement of the Masoretic notes, the spacing of the dedication and the reuse of a layout from one manuscript to another are the evidence by which Samuel's hand is identified. For the descriptive terms used in such work, the handbook of Israel Yeivin, who also gave the sigla L17 and 2ק by which two of the related codices are known, remains the usual starting point.⁴

Notes and References

Selected Bibliography