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• Introduction
• The East Asian Collection
• The Islamic Collection
• The Western Collection
  • Papyri
  • Manuscripts
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    • Hebrew Samaritan
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Hebrew and Samaritan

Many of the smaller collections within the Chester Beatty Library, such as the Hebrew and Samaritan Collections, contain very few volumes, which perhaps reflects the difficulty that Chester Beatty faced in obtaining such works.

Beatty's main advisor for Near Eastern manuscripts was a Yemeni Jewish émigré, Abraham Shalom Yahuda (1877-1951), who eventually became a professor at Yale. Dr Yahuda was himself a great book collector, and his collection is now at the Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem. Yahuda sourced manuscripts for Beatty from 1927 until Beatty moved to Ireland in 1949.

It is possible that Yahuda, as a fellow collector of Jewish texts, did not provide suitable texts for Beatty but kept them mostly for himself or sold them to other Jewish collectors.

The Samaritan Collection

The Samaritan Collection consists of two books and a collection of several fragments - individual leaves or groups of leaves from a variety of manuscripts.

These are all copies of the one text (the Samaritan Pentateuch) and range in date from the twelfth to the seventeenth century.

Undoubtedly, the two Samaritan codices Ms 751 (1225) and Ms 752 (1339) are of international importance. These were purchased by Beatty in 1930, through Dr Yahuda.

The Hebrew Collection

The Hebrew Collection is represented by twenty-one books, but here the items are very much later in date than the Samaritan Collection, mostly eighteenth or nineteenth century with the earliest possibly seventeenth century and, the latest, a twentieth-century souvenir from Jerusalem. They are mostly Esther scrolls (eight), Torah scrolls (six) or mezuza (three).

The most notable illuminated text is an Italian Hebrew Bible, Ms 772 (c. sixteenth century).
Most of the Hebrew manuscripts would appear to have originated in Italy, as many are written in an Italian quadrate script, but nearly all were bought in Cairo in 1930.

The most interesting are a Hebrew Yemenite Pentateuch bound together with a copy of Tijan's Grammatical Introduction to the Bible, Ms 761 (c. thirteenth century) and a Hebrew cabalistic and astronomical codex from Spain, Ms 762 (c. 1762).

Publications

Plummer, Reinhart (1979) 'The Samaritan Manuscripts of the Chester Beatty Library', Studies (spring/summer): 66-79.