Vladimir Ivanov’s “Jewish Manuscripts”. Part 1. The Collection And The Archive

The “Bukharian Collection” of Vladimir A. Ivanov included dozens of Jewish manuscripts. They came to the Asian Museum in St. Petersburg in 1915, and Alexander A. Freiman systematized some of them – in Judeo-Persian only – by 1918. Over the past century, there have been several (re-)inventories, so nowadays one cannot rely on those obsolete publications, working with these monuments. Part of the provenance has been lost. Basing on Ivanov’s archive and the inventory books of different years, this article is an attempt to update the information on all Jewish manuscripts acquired in Bukhara. The Aramaic and Hebrew manuscripts are new to the scientific circulation, the provenance of the Judeo-Persian manuscripts is clarified. Ivanov’s personal notes for each manuscript are scarce. Nevertheless, they are the primary source about the manuscripts, and today his “notebook” on the “Collection” is kept in the Archive of Orientalists of the Institute of Oriental Studies RAS. Using Ivanov’s list of manuscripts and their description by Freiman, as well as the current inventory, I managed to restore the provenance of almost all monuments. Some last Hebrew manuscripts in this list are particularly difficult to identify, while other monuments within the Jewish fund have been erroneously attributed to the “Collection” for a long time. Only one manuscript from Bukhara has remained unidentified. Checking the rest of the manuscripts for Ivanov’s notes at the margins in his “notebook” helped to match and connect the archival data with the source data of the manuscripts.