The sources of Yahuda’s collections

Much further study is needed to identify the origins of Yahuda’s manuscript collections. Fortunately, he kept a careful archive of his correspondence, and these letters provide a window onto his collecting activities.

In 1941, he described his collection and its origins in this way:

The Collection, which I began to assemble some 45 years ago, was brought together from all parts of the East. They have mostly been purchased from private scholars and libraries, which belonged to old patrician or scholarly families of Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, Tunis, Fes and other ancient towns of the Islamic world. Some others emanate from private mosques in larger or smaller cities in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, Turkey, Persia, Morocco, India and other parts of the East, including the Yemen in South Arabia, Adana and Ankara in Asia Minor. Only a very small part was acquired in Europe from private collections or at auctions.

While Yahuda identifies here three types of sources — private libraries, mosques and auctions —further details emerge in his letters and from the manuscripts themselves.

Some of Yahuda’s manuscripts were acquired through the purchase of whole libraries. In July 1928, Yahuda wrote to Chester Beatty, “I have now a nice little collection of valuable and rare MSS. by famous authors, which I picked from among three collections I bought at Damascus, the Lebanon and Cairo.” He split up many of these libraries, and in some cases, split up multivolume copies. Manuscripts now in different libraries can be shown to have once belonged to a multivolume set or the same private library.

Yahuda also had a wide network of contacts in the world of Arabic publishing. His letters reflect that his publishing contacts in Cairo, Beirut, Hyderabad and elsewhere were important sources for his acquisition of manuscripts.

Yahuda’s archive also reveals that on at least one occasion he arranged to purchase manuscripts from an endowed mosque library. After a trip to Acre in May of 1929, Yahuda wrote that he had visited “the wonderful mosque of Djezar Pasha, the defender of Acre against Napoleon, and also had a glimpse of the library which contains now almost only printed books and very few MSS, the last important ones still left there I hope to get through a scholar there soon.” While this scholar hasn’t yet been identified, he or she was apparently successful in acquiring manuscripts from the mosque endowment for Yahuda. A number of manuscripts bearing the endowment notice of the Jazzār Pasha mosque library are currently held in Princeton and at the Chester Beatty.

Written by Garrett Davidson and Torsten Wollina