Moses Shapira’s Manuscript Sales to the Royal Library. By R. Jefferson and M. Press
Channel: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Date: 2022-08-15

Moses Shapira’s Manuscript Sales to the Royal Library and the Transformation of the Antiquities Trade in Late Ottoman Palestine 

Moses Shapira (1830-1884) is known today primarily as an antiquities dealer, infamous for his involvement with thousands of fake Moabite pots and figurines (1,800 of which were sold to the German government) and the forged ancient manuscript of Deuteronomy. But, in fact, Shapira sold hundreds of authentic medieval and early modern manuscripts to institutions in Germany and England in the 1870s and 1880s. This paper will look at the manuscripts Shapira sold to the then-Royal Library in Berlin between 1873 and 1883: what were they, how did he get them, and how profitable were they? It will then put these manuscript sales in the context of the sales of antiquities of various kinds (including artifacts of clay, stone, metal, etc.) from Palestine in the Late Ottoman period. For most of the 19th century, dealers in Palestine sold material to customers in the country, in many (but certainly not all) cases European scholars and tourists; their collections in turn were often bought in the end by major European libraries and museums. By the 1870s, however, manuscript dealers like Shapira and Jacob Saphir started to cut out the middlemen and marketed their inventory directly to these European institutions. This move marked an important transition, one that would transform both the nature and scale of the trade in Palestinian antiquities. 

Dr Rebecca J.W. Jefferson is the Curator of the Isser and Rae Price Library of Judaica at the University of Florida, USA, and a joint faculty member of the Center for Jewish Studies.
Dr Michael Press is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Agder in Kristiansand/Norway.