Formerly the Imperial Public Library and, after the Revolution, the Publichnaia Biblioteka imeni M. E. Saltykova-Shchedrina (Saltykov-Shchedrin Public Library(. When the Library opened in St. Petersburg in 1805 the only Hebrew manuscript in its possession was an eighteenth-century Esther scroll. By 1852 there were six Hebrew manuscripts in the library, and in 1858 the library acquired a small number of manuscripts, mostly Karaite, from K. Tischendorf. The expansion of the library’s collection began with the purchase in 1862 of about 800 non-biblical manuscripts, a large number of biblical manuscripts, scrolls and fragments from the Karaite Abraham Firkovich. It continued with the acquisitions of the 'Odessa Collection’, containing 95 manuscripts, in 1863; the Second Firkovich Collection, which contains more than 15,600 manuscripts and fragments, in 1876, two years after Firkovich’s death; the 1,189 Genizah fragments from the Antonin collection towards the end of the nineteenth century; and additional manuscripts in the twentieth century. Altogether, the Hebraica/Judaica collections of the library include more than 18,000 items.
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