Scholarship for PhD Students — Mikhail Arsenyev
The project of Mikhail Arsenyev, a PhD student at the Faculty of Oriental Studies at St. Petersburg State University: "Biblical Manuscripts from the Collections of A.S. Firkovich and Archimandrite Antonin: History of Acquisition, Codicological and Textological Study of Individual Manuscripts and Their Typological Groups." The project has been completed. An article has been published: М. Арсеньев. Караимская средневековая книга: фрагменты Торы X века из Второго собрания А. С. Фирковича (Араб.-евр. 211+). Индоевропейское языкознание и классическая филология, 29. 2025.
The Russian National Library holds the most important collections of manuscripts created in a Jewish milieu — the collections of the renowned Karaite A. S. Firkovich and Archimandrite Antonin (Kapustin). Among them, biblical manuscripts, mostly fragments, hold a special place.
The goal of this research is to study individual biblical codices and their typological groups, which are of particular interest to scholars due to textual variations from the "canonical" biblical text (the text of the Leningrad Codex and other early Masoretic manuscripts), and the connection between textual and codicological features with the time and place of the manuscripts' creation. An important part of the research is establishing the provenance of the studied manuscripts.
In the photo: Manuscript from the RNB (Russian National Library) Department of Manuscripts, Antonin Collection, Ant. B 11, fragment of Psalms with large and small Masorah, 11th century (RNB collection).
The research is carried out with the financial support of A. Klyachin.
The work on the project has been completed.