From Sinai to Munich: Tracing the History of a Fragment from the Grote Collection

In 1921, the Bavarian State Library acquired six Christian Arabic manuscript fragments from the notorious collector Friedrich Grote. All fragments, just like a yet to be determined number of Christian Oriental manuscripts from the Grote collection, originally came from St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai. The aim of the following notes is to exemplarily trace the history of one of these fragments from its place of origin to its present location. The reconstruction of the fragment’s whereabouts is largely based on hitherto unused archival material. It will shed new light on the persona of the erratic collector and his methods of manuscript acquisition. This has important implications not only for the membra disjecta of the original Sinaitic codex from which the Munich fragment derives, but for all fragments of Sinaitic origin from the former Grote collection. The activity of collectors like Grote led to the dispersion of fragments of some of St. Catherine’s most valuable and historically significant manuscripts. These notes are a modest contribution to restoring the integrity of these historical artifacts.